1. Pronouns

2. Pronouns
Pronouns stand in for nouns and make the writing seem less repetitive.
Take a look at this paragraph. Read it without pronouns. Now replace the proper noun Peter with a pronoun.
Peter thought about Peter's mother a great deal. Peter remembered the first time. Peter's mother took Peter to town when Peter's mother took Peter's hand and helped Peter across the road. Whenever Peter and Peter's mother went to town, Peter's mother always bought Peter a Boston bun because Peter's mother knew how much Peter liked Boston buns.

3. Pronouns
The noun that replaces a pronoun is called the antecedent.

4. Personal Pronouns Singular Plural I, me, mine we, us, our, ours
You, your, yours you, your, yours
She, her, hers they, them,
He, him his their theirs
It, its
Label the point of view on the table in your notes

5. Pronouns
Pronouns also establish the point of view of the narrator.

6. Student Error
We ate at McDonald’s for breakfast, it was delicious. I got a breakfast biscuit, hash browns, and orange juice. It looked beautiful, it had a picture. That had dolphins and sharks and fish. It was really nice inside McDonald’s.
It is not clear what it is.

7. Pronouns and Antecedents
Roald Dahl wrote a memoir called Boy: Tales of Childhood. One of the funniest chapters is about a sweet-shop that he used to visit with his friends. You have to read the book in order to find out what he did to Mrs. Pratchett.
Highlight the pronouns in the next three slides.

8. The sweet-shop. was the very centre of our lives
The sweet-shop. . .was the very centre of our lives. To us, it was what a bar is to a drunk, or a church to a Bishop. Without it, there would have been little to live for. But it had one terrible drawback, this sweet-shop. The woman who owned it was a horror. We hated her and had good reason for doing so.

9. Her name was Mrs. Pratchett
Her name was Mrs. Pratchett. She was a small skinny old hag with a moustache on her upper lip. . . She never smiled. She never welcomed us when we went in, and the only times she spoke were when she had said things like, “I’m watchin’ you so keep your thievin’ fingers off them chocolates!” Or “I don’t want you in ’ere just to look around! Either you forks out or you gets out!”

10. But by far the most loathsome thing about Mrs
But by far the most loathsome thing about Mrs. Pratchett was the filth that clung around her. Her apron was grey and greasy. Her blouse had bits of breakfast all over it, toast-crumbs and tea stains and splotches of dead egg-yolk. It was her hands, however, that disturbed us most. They were disgusting. They were black with dirt and grime.

11. Now, with a pencil, draw an arrow from each pronoun to the pronoun’s antecedent. The first pronoun “our” is referring to Roald Dahl and his friends. So write friends in the upper corner. Draw an arrow from the “our” and any other pronoun referring to the friends, to the word friends.