GrammarPhile Blog

A compound construction is one in which two or more words share the same role in a sentence. When a pronoun is the final element in these constructions, there's a tendency to use the wrong form, particularly when the choice is between I and me. A good way to tell which form is correct in these situations is to see how the sentence would sound if that pronoun were by itself, or if it were the first word in the construction.

• administration; the Obama administration
• brain trust
• cabinet (but the Cabinet in the Obama administration)
• city hall (the municipal government)
• civil service
• court (a royal court)
• executive, legislative, or judicial branch
• federal; the federal government; federal agencies
• government
• monarchy
• parlement (French; but the Parlement of Paris)
• state; church and state; state powers
• the Department of State; the State Department; the department
• the Bureau of the Census; the census of 1960
• the County Board of Brevard County; the Brevard County Board; the county board
• the Peace Corps
• the United States Congress; the U.S. Congress; the Ninety-seventh Congress; Congress; 97th Cong.; congressional
• the Crown (the British monarchy); Crown lands
• the Privy Council (but a Privy Counsellor)
• the Parliament of Canada; the Senate (upper house); the House of Commons (lower house)
• the Chicago City Council; the city council
• the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit; the court of appeals
• the Supreme Court of Canada
• the League of Nations; the League
• the Capitol (as distinct from the capital city)

• the Boston Tea Party
• the Cultural Revolution
• the War on Poverty
• the Great Depression; the Depression
• the Great Recession
• the Industrial Revolution
• the civil rights movement
• the cold war
• the crash of 1929
• the gold rush
• the baby boom
• September 11; 9/11
• (President Johnson's) Great Society
• the annual State of the Union address
• the Checkers speech
• Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech
• ancient Greece
• the baroque period
• the colonial period
• the Victorian era
• the antebellum period
• the Age of Reason
• the Common Era
• the Gay Nineties
• the Enlightenment
• the Middle Ages (but the medieval era)
• the Bronze Age
• the Ice Age
• the nuclear age
• the information age
• the Great Plague; the plague
• the Chicago Fire; the fire
• the Kentucky Derby; the derby
• Girl Scouts of America; a Girl Scout; a Scout
• the League of Women Voters; the league

As you can imagine, we see thousands of documents weekly at ProofreadNOW. We're cataloging a huge collection of contextual errors as we solve more and more problems for our clients.