Me and I and what's the difference anyway?

My grandfather was a teacher. He taught in country schools so he was used teaching everything to any age group. Car trips (to an English-geek like me) were always fun because he would give me words to spell and I loved spelling (you can see it starts young!). But Grandad also liked to correct our grammar. This was confusing to a child of ten who had not been taught grammar at school beyond what nouns, verbs and adjectives were. One lesson really stuck with me. On that day I had got me and I mixed up and Grandad shared a surefire way of getting it right. I'll let you into his secret, but first let's look at the theory.


So what exactly am I talking about? You know, when you are emailing your friends and you want to say

Come to the movies tonight. Jordan, Harper and I are going.

Which is somehow different from

Darcy has invited Jordan, Harper and me to the movies.

But why should it be different? Well, because I is a subject pronoun and me is an object pronoun. Their purpose in the sentence decides which one you should use. This roughly translates to mean that after verbs and prepositions use me; before verbs use I.

So, looking at our examples

Come to the movies tonight. Jordan, Harper and I are going.

In this example, the names are all listed before the verb ('are') so we use I.

  Darcy has invited Jordan, Harper and me to the movies.

The list of names is after the verb ('invited') so we use me.

And what was that surefire tip of Grandad's? The one that meant that you didn't have to know what a verb or a preposition was?

Take out the other names in the sentence and see if it still works.

Come to the movies tonight. I am going.

Darcy has invited me to the movies.

It works!