Objective and Possessive Cases

His vs. Him

Don’t Say: It’s a question of him being ready on time.
Say Instead: It’s a question of his being ready on time.

Here’s Why: This is a problem of using the objective case where the possessive one is needed. What’s being possessed? It doesn’t have to be tangible, such as a book. In this example it’s a state, the state of “being ready on time.” So the possessive form “his” is required. The possessives “my,” “her,” “their,” and “your” can be used the same way, as we’ll see in the next error.

Their vs. Them

Don’t Say: It was the teacher’s willingness to consider them leaving early that surprised the students most.
Say Instead: It was the teacher’s willingness to consider their leaving early that surprised the students most.

Here’s Why: Again, we need the possessive case here, “their.” That’s because the pronoun isn’t functioning as an ob¬ject, it’s doing the job of an adjective by indicating whose early leaving we’re talking about.

Here’s another correct example:

Marge objected to their eating during the ceremony.

What’s being possessed is an action: Marge objects to eat¬ing, but not to all eating; she hasn’t started a Society for the Prevention of Eating. So we need a possessive adjective to say whose eating Marge objects to: not to eating in general, but to their eating.

But wait, it gets trickier. One reason why these sentences are so tough is that they look like another kind of sentence that needs another kind of pronoun. The following example is correct:

Marge saw them eating during the ceremony.

What happened? Well, our emphasis has changed from the action of eating to the people doing the eating. Marge sees them—the direct object of the sentence—and “eating” modi¬fies “them”—it describes what they are doing while Marge happens to see them.

Tip: How can you tell which kind of a sentence you’ve got? One good test is to try leaving the “-ing” word out. If the sentence still communicates the most important part of its mean¬ing, then the emphasis is on the people, and you need the objec¬tive case. “Marge saw them” tells us who it was that Marge saw perfectly well; we don’t really need to know that they were eating.

But if the meaning of the sentence changes dramatically when you leave out the “-ing” word, then the emphasis is on the action, and all you need is a possessive pronoun to modify it. “Marge objected to them,” for example, just doesn’t com-municate the essence of Marge’s original objection. She didn’t object to everything about them, to their hair or their clothes or their politics, for example. She objected only to their eat¬ing. The emphasis is on the action, so Marge needs a posses¬sive. Here are some more preferred choices of each kind of sentence.

Bob was irritated by my singing in the shower.

We’ve decided to put a stop to your bickering with your sister.
Because the pronoun depends on what the speaker wants to emphasize, sometimes there is no cut-and-dried “correct” choice: it’s entirely up to the speaker. The following two examples are both correct.

Everyone in the house heard me singing in the shower.

Everyone in the house heard my singing in the shower.