In this final article on pronouns I will be addressing pronouns used for third person.
Pronouns take the place of nouns which means that third person pronouns do the same thing. They take the place of people, but these pronouns do not include first person or second person forms.
Third person singular pronouns are: he, she, and it. These pronouns are used when the pronoun is the subject of the sentence.
He went to the store and never came back.
She tried not to run away from the Blob.
It was amazing and terrifying at the same time.
Or if you are listening to a teenager:
He told me that she was going to break it when he gave her the note.
Huh? Teens can be confusing, but pronouns are not the culprit.
The pronoun is the object of the sentence when pronoun is affected by the action of the sentence rather than doing the action. For third person singular pronouns the object forms are him, her, and it.
I want him to leave right now.
They laughed at her because she had toilet paper on her shoe.
Shelly can’t stand it.
Pronouns can also be possessive. When pronouns are possessive there is a noun following the pronoun. Possessive pronouns show that the pronoun possesses the object. Third person pronouns are his, her, and its.
His cat is bald but just around the nose.
Her mother is extremely ugly which is unfortunate because they say that we will all end up like our parents.
Its shoulder is busted in three places.
Third person pronouns that don’t have a noun following them are his, hers, and (though rarely) its.
Those books on cell reproduction are his because he’s the only person nerdy enough to care about eukaryotic cells.
Ideas on the topic of Scotch tape being too sticky are hers.
Since examples using its as a third person pronoun without a noun following it will be too confusing, I have not included it.
Third person pronouns can also be in the plural form. Third person plural pronouns are they, them, their, and theirs.
They want to get out of town before something terrible happens to the tiny town of Phelan.
It’s not my fault that the meteor hit them on their way out of town.
Their car suffered major damage though the passengers themselves did not have a scratch on them.
No one will be moving into that house because it is still theirs even though they are leaving the country.
Pronouns are an important tool in writing because it saves you the repetition of nouns. If you write without pronouns then your writing will suffer (because quite frankly a pronoun-less world is not a world that I want to live in) and your readers will want to strangle you. If you need to brush up on your pronoun forms you can find them here: first person singular pronouns (subject and object), first person possessive and plural, and second person singular and plural.