These Monday Mistakes just keep showing up! I’m not sure if that makes me happy or sad. For example, consider this online ad that showed up on my laptop screen this week. Do you see the error?
It should say, “It matters whom you travel with.”
Do you struggle to remember when to use whom instead of who? Here’s help…
My oldest, who is following in my footsteps and taking over www.weknowwords.com for his freelance proofreading business, gave me a simple way to remember: If he or she is the correct pronoun, then who is the correct word. If him or her is the correct pronoun, then whom is the correct word.
To run this test, you’ll likely have to rewrite a question into a sentence, but here’s how you check. Let’s say you’re confused between:
- Who did you give the invoice to?
- Whom did you give the invoice to?
Rewrite it as:
- I gave the invoice to he.
- I gave the invoice to him.
And you’ll quickly see the correct word is whom.
Now, how do we get the copywriter who wrote that ad to learn this simple lesson?!
Sharon Ernst
Sharon Ernst is a freelance editor and writer at www.weknowwords.com. To share what she's learned in her 20+ years in the business, she started www.betterfasterwriter.com to offer ebooks, classes, a newsletter and this blog to help improve the business and marketing writing skills of today’s workforce.