My sons teacher
talked to my husband and I about the difficulty he was having with reading,
writing and he couldn’t complete the math homework. He said some testing is
required.
1. Possessive noun: an apostrophe is
missing from son’s.
2. Pronoun:
“my husband and I” are the object of the verb “talked”, so the pronoun needs to
be in the objective case—“me”.
3. Ambiguity: who does the first usage of
the pronoun “he” refer to? The nearest appropriate antecedent is the noun
“husband”, but that doesn’t make sense. The noun “son” needs to be specified.
4. Parallel construction: reading, writing
and ?? these are gerunds, and next noun
needs to be a gerund, too: “completing math homework” would work.
5. Ambiguity: The second usage of “he” is
also ambiguous. It should refer to the teacher.
6. Direct
or indirect speech: The final sentence can be either direct speech in which
case quotation marks are needed (The teacher said, “Some ….”) or indirect
speech (The teacher said that some ….”).
Possible Answer: My son’s teacher talked to my husband and me
about the difficulty our son was having with reading, writing and completing
the math homework, The teacher said that
some testing is required.
2 comments:
Can you explain this because “my husband and I” sounds right to me
“my husband and I” are the object of the verb “talked”, so the pronoun needs to be in the objective case—“me”.
JESSE: It's correct when "my husband and I" are the subject of the verb; e.g My husband and I went to the mall. If you wanted to replace that compound subject with a pronoun, it would be "we went to the mall". However, in the sentence "The teacher talked to my husband and I" that compound is the object of the verb--you would never use the subject pronoun to replace it: "The teacher talked to we"--you would say "The teacher talked to us". The singular object pronoun is "me" not "I". The other way to figure this out is to take out the noun from the combination and ask whether you would then use "I" or "me". The problem is that we hear the incorrect grammar so often in common speech that we don't recognize it as incorrect. I hope this helps.
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