A New Year's resolution reset: Learn when it's OK to use 'and me'

So how’s your New Year’s resolution going so far? Hmm. I see. I was afraid of that.

Would you like me to get you off the hook? Because I can suggest a much easier resolution that, with a little work upfront, will require zero effort for the rest of the year. The rest of your life, even. Here it is: Learn when to say “and me” instead of “and I.”

Trust me, this will put your grammar far ahead of most people’s. And it will achieve your goal of using “and I” in the first place: to speak as correctly as possible.

To say “Thanks for visiting Maria and I” isn’t wrong, exactly. Most people do, and you can continue to do so if you like. But it’s not grammatical. It’s idiomatic, meaning it has become standard and therefore acceptable.

When people say “and I,” it’s usually because they’re trying to be grammatical, proper. People  assume “I” is best because, as kids, we were swiftly corrected for saying something like “Maria and me are going to the movies.” It seemed that every time we chose “me,” an adult told us we should instead use “I.” They weren’t wrong. “Maria and I are going to the movies” is the grammatical alternative to “Maria and me are going to the movies.”

But we took it too far: We got the sense that “me” was always inferior, so we started using “I” in stuff like “Thanks for visiting Maria and I.” That’s not the proper English we’re shooting for.

“Me” and “I” have different functions in a sentence. “I” is a subject: I met Maria. “Me” is an object: Maria met me. Understanding this is crucial to choosing correctly between “I” and “me.”

Luckily, you already know how to get this right every time. You never say, “Me like pizza” or “Tell I.”  Because you already understand subjects and objects, you say instead “I like pizza” and “Tell me.”

Your understanding of object pronouns goes even deeper: You also understand that prepositions — little words like “to,” “with,” “at,” “on” and “in” — also take object pronouns. Instead of “Listen to I” you say “Listen to me.” Instead of “Come with I,” you say “Come with me.”

This doesn’t stop with “I” and “me.” You understand how to use every other pronoun pair including “he” and “him,” “she” and “her” and “we” and “us.” That’s why you use “tell him” instead of “tell he” and “between us” instead of “between we.” Effortless grammatical perfection.

Yet, if you’re like most English speakers, all your deep knowledge of object pronouns goes out the window when you add another person to the sentence. People frequently say things like “You should listen to Sam and I” and “You should come to the movies with Alexis and I” and, the one that even careful speakers say, “Between you and I.”

If you’re aiming for proper speech, these fall short of your goal. But there’s a simple way to get these right in 2026 and beyond: Consider the sentence without the other person.

When you want to say, “You should listen to Sam and I,” consider “You should listen to I.” It sounds wrong because it is wrong. You know it’s “You should listen to me.” Sam doesn’t change that.

Instead of “This is about you and I,” try “This is about I.” You see instantly that you need “me” here. So say, “This is about you and me.”

This trick doesn’t work great for “between you and I,” because “between” requires a pair of things for its object. In this case, you can plug in “we” and “us.” Clearly, “between we” is ungrammatical, which is how you know an object pronoun, like “us” or “me,” is the way to go.

That’s it. Just try your sentence without the other person a couple of times. You’ll soon see when “and me” is better than “and I.”

Danglers aren't easy

Danglers are easy to spot but can be surprisingly tough to fix.

As a working mom, finding time to get enough sleep is difficult.

Technically, this is a dangler because the modifying phrase — in this case the first four words — isn’t right next to the noun it should be modifying. The whole dangler concept, in fact, is based on the idea that any phrase that functions like an adjective, modifying a noun, should be right next to that noun.

As a working mom, Jane finds it hard to get enough sleep.

Here, the modifying phrase “as a working mom” is right next to the noun it modifies, “Jane.” So this sentence does not contain a dangler. But in the first example, that same phrase is positioned next to the word “finding,” which is clearly not the noun that we’re describing as a working mom. That’s the difference.

This one was easy to fix because we made up a person and rearranged the main clause so that her name would be the first thing to come after the modifying phrase. But what if we don’t want to name a specific working mom?

As a working mom, a woman finds it hard to get enough sleep.

Awful, huh? So here’s another way to go.

A working mom finds it hard to get enough sleep.

Here we dispensed with the modifying phrase altogether and pilfered its noun to make it the subject of our single-clause sentence. That’s okay, I suppose. But this sentence now seems lacking.

One option, of course, is to just ignore the fact that our first sentence contained a dangler. After all, the whole point of all this grammar stuff is to ensure clarity. And that sentence was pretty clear from the get-go. Still, it lacks precision, which I value a lot. So I would definitely look for ways to improve the sentence before throwing my hands up.

When a word or phrase that’s dangling is a participle, the error is called a (wait for it) dangling participle. This can either mean progressive participle like "walking," "knowing," "realizing," or "yelling," or a past participle like "surprised," "shaken," "hired," or "thought." And it can mean either a lone participle like “Surprised, Roger jumped sky high,” or a longer participial phrase like, “Surprised by screams of his friends and family, Roger jumped sky high.”

But even noun phrases can dangle:

A man of great courage, the steps John took were impressive.

The steps aren’t a man. So this is a dangler, and it’s definitely one I would fix: John was a man of great courage, and the steps he took were impressive.

But, in my experience, sometimes it's best to let a dangler dangle.

How to write every holiday

Here comes another year full of holidays — some of them easy to write, others not so much (as anyone who’s wondered where to put the apostrophe in Presidents Day can attest). So as 2025 winds down, here’s how to write all the holidays to come in 2026.

New Year’s, New Year, new year. A new year in the generic sense isn’t capitalized. So you’d say, “Looking forward to seeing you in the new year.” But holidays are almost always proper nouns, so “happy New Year” gets a capital n and y (and note the lowercase h). When you’re making resolutions, that’s usually treated as possessive: a New Year’s resolution.

New Year’s Day, New Year’s Eve. Treat these as distinct holiday names, with “Day” and “Eve” capitalized.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day. There’s no “Rev.” or “Dr.” in the holiday, which falls on the third Monday in January. And according to both the Associated Press Stylebook and the Chicago Manual of Style, you shouldn’t put commas around “Jr.”

Valentine’s Day. Put an apostrophe and an s after “Valentine” when you’re talking about the holiday, making it singular possessive. The word “valentine” is lowercase when you’re talking about your loved one or a card or gift for that person: He’s my valentine. I’m sending him a valentine. You can also call the holiday Saint Valentine’s Day.

Presidents Day. Every third Monday in February, people are baffled about how to punctuate Presidents. And for good reason: There are several correct ways to write this holiday name. AP style says no apostrophe: Presidents Day. Chicago style writes it as plural possessive, with the apostrophe after the s: Presidents’ Day. It’s also commonly called Washington’s Birthday. All of these are correct.

St. Patrick’s Day. There was just one St. Patrick, so this holiday, which falls on March 17, is singular possessive, meaning the apostrophe goes before the s.

April Fools’ Day. As you can surely attest, there’s more than one fool out there. This day is for all of them, so write it as plural possessive, with the apostrophe after the s: Fools’. If you’re using “fool” in a generic sense, for example if someone falls for a trick, you call them an April fool with a lowercase f.

Mother’s Day. In May, the logic of possessive and singular holidays breaks down completely. Even though the day is for all mothers, we write it as though it’s for just one: Mother. So the holiday is Mother’s Day.

Fourth of July, July Fourth, the Fourth. To follow the style of professional publishers, don’t use a numeral in this holiday name. Spell out Fourth when you write Fourth of July, July Fourth or the Fourth — all are correct. If you don’t care about editing style, there’s nothing wrong with writing July 4th or even 4th of July.

Veterans Day. If you’ve ever noticed that many news outlets use no apostrophe in “farmers market,” you have a basis for understanding why there’s no apostrophe in Veterans Day. The idea is that the words “farmers” and “Veterans” are working more like adjectives in these terms than like true possessives. So just “Veterans Day” is the way to go.

Thanksgiving Day. Thanksgiving is one of the easier holidays to write. But “Thanksgiving Day” isn’t as clear. For the record, the word “Day” gets capitalized when you’re making it part of a holiday nickname. So: Thanksgiving Day.

Hanukkah, Chanukah. Both these spellings are correct, but Merriam-Webster’s dictionary says Hanukkah is more common and AP style prefers the H spelling as well.

Christmas Day, Christmas Eve. Just as we saw with Thanksgiving, the “Day” in “Christmas Day” gets capitalized, and the same logic applies to “Christmas Eve.”

Xmas. Write Xmas with no hyphen. And don’t worry that this is in any way anti-religious. According to Garner’s Modern American Usage, “The X is not a Roman X but a Greek chi — the first letter in Christ’s name.” So this abbreviated holiday name in no way erases its namesake. If do you use it, note that you can use “a” or “an” in front of it, depending on how you believe Xmas is pronounced. If in your mind it sounds like eks-mas, you would write “an Xmas present.” But if you hear it as Christmas, you would write “a Xmas present.”

Spring, summer, fall, autumn, winter. Seasons are all lowercase, “I love the spring.”

Poor headline capitalization: A major tell

If there’s one thing that can tell me, in a single glance, that a news article was not edited by an experienced pro, it’s the headline capitalization.

Here’s an example from a Yahoo Finance headline I saw a while back:

Stocks Pull Back: Why it Might Not Last

One look at that headline and I know that someone in the organization doesn’t know what they’re doing. The reason: the lowercase I in “it.”

A lot of editing styles capitalize the first letter of most words in a headline, but they make exceptions for some prepositions, articles, and conjunctions — especially short ones of three or fewer letters — unless they come at the beginning or end of the headline.

“Simpson Back in Jail”: Here, the word “in” is lowercase because it’s a short preposition. But if "in" were first or last word, the "i" would be capitalized: “In Jails, Mental Health Suffers” or in “Jones Decries the Mess He’s In.”

These capitalization rules aren’t a matter of right and wrong. This is a style thing. But when you’re making a clear effort to follow this style, you don’t want the world to see that you don’t know how.

In the case of our Yahoo headline, the editor was probably used to seeing “Simpson Back in Jail” and gave “it” the same treatment as “in.” That was a mistake.

"In" is a preposition. "It" is a pronoun.

I see the same mistake with “is.” Just because it’s a two-letter word starting with I doesn’t mean it should be treated like “in.” "Is" is a verb.

Some online publications just skirt the whole issue by capitalizing every single letter, including all the prepositions, articles and conjunctions: “Simpson In Jail And Out Of The Way.” At least in this style you don’t have to test your editors’ knowledge of prepositions, conjunctions and articles. But it sure looks ugly.

The best course is just to learn the basic parts of speech before you publish.