It's a tough job, but somebody has to patrol the pronoun beat. Do you have what it takes?

My father is close to death, and in his final hours, he begins his journey by
asking anyone within earshot of his bed for a few things.
He asks to be allowed to go back home to Florida.
He asks to be able to cast off his dreary hospital gown, to be reunited to the shape of his own clothes.
He wants someone to fetch him his shoes, now useless for weeks, the impossible act of slipping them on, the slight miracle of bending and tying.
In his wishes, my mother arrives and sits at his bedside, or he changes it, and he walks back into his house, into the living room, his old chair.
He is so close to dreaming now, and his body lifts with the desire to fix things.

Why Use Pronouns?

Cornelius Eady's "One Kind Favor" is so tightly-focused on his father's dying moments that proper nouns aren't necessary -- a simple "he" suffices.

Eady ignores the rule of thumb that tells a writer to reinsert the original noun ("father") after a few uses of the pronoun ("he") in order to remind the reader who the subject is. Good writers often break so-called rules of grammar for a desired effect. The trick is in knowing when and how. In Eady's poem, the pronouns work because Eady understands how language functions.

Pronouns at Work

In majority decisions the Supreme Court always uses the personal pronoun "we." Read about the sensation caused when Justice Stephen Breyer refered to himself as "I."

Watch how pronouns work in this sentence:

Bill reminded Susan that he wanted to meet her friend.

Bill reminded Susan that Bill wanted to meet Susan's friend.

Personal pronouns substitute for beings and objects. Personal pronouns vary in four ways:

number	examples: I, we
gender	examples: him, her, it
person	examples: "I" for first person, "you" for second person, "she" for third person
case	examples: "he" for subjective case, "him" for objective case, "his" for possessive case

Pronoun-/Antecedent Agreement

Kids, don't try this at school! E. E. Cummings got away with using pronouns without antecedents in "Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town." He earned the poetic license by knowing the rules of grammar and punctuation before he broke them.

If you read "Susan picked up his basketball," you would assume that Susan is now holding someone else's basketball. There has to be agreement of gender ("her basketball") for the reader to understand that Susan picked up her own basketball. Either that, or some poor guy is named Susan.

The sentences "Why should I study grammar? You don't get anything out of it" lack agreement person. When the writer uses "you" instead of "I" to start the second sentence, he seems to be saying that he need not study grammar because the person to whom he is speaking won't get anything out of it. But it is the writer himself who claims to get nothing out of the study of grammar.

Vague Pronoun Reference

"Had Jane brought her pool pass?" Mom wondered.

Mom thought, "Has Jane brought my pool pass?"

Is It "Its" or Is It "It's"?

Thorny Issue: "Which" or "That"?

In the sentence "The house that collapsed in the tornado was rebuilt," it is essential to know that the house was damaged in a tornado to understand why it is being rebuilt. But in the sentence "The house, which originally belonged to Bill, collapsed in the tornado," the reader doesn't really need to know it was Bill's house.

Write an anaphoric poem. In anaphora, a word or phrase is repeated at the beginning of several lines or sentences in a row. An anaphoric poem, for example, might describe someone by beginning each line with the same pronoun. A good example of this is "He" by John Ashbery.

Prewriting

Decide if the person or character you are going to describe is male or female. Write the appropriate pronoun ("he" or "she") at the beginning of about 10 lines. On each line, write a sentence with the first specific thing that comes to mind about the character, making sure to include objects. Be willing to be somewhat outrageous here. On one line, you might write:

He rides the 47 Bus without a shirt, searching for the perfect pizza.

On another line, you might write:

He heads for home, holding a comic book and an empty box.

Look over the sentences you wrote. Which ones could create some kind of consistent portrait of your character? Save those. Discard any sentences that don't work for you. Add any that seem relevant now. Use your strongest sentence as your opening line. Place a line at the end that brings the poem to some sort of conclusion. Give the piece a title.

Revising

Have you included objects that enhance your portrait of this character? Are your nouns specific? Are your verbs active and specific? Do the adjectives and adverbs you used strengthen the nouns and verbs they modify?

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