Use Pronouns to Improve Writing

Look at the sentences below.  What can you see wrong?

Fred was hungry.  Fred ate an apple and then Fred felt better.

Grammatically, the sentence is fine but there is a lot of repetition of the noun Fred!

Nouns (naming words) are a really important part of writing but using them over and over again can make our writing repetitive and dull.  For this reason, we need to use pronouns.

Pronouns can be used in place of nouns.  Let's see if we can improve our writing with pronouns.

Fred was hungry.  He ate an apple and then he felt better.

That's more like it!  The reader knows we are still thinking about Fred, but we've avoided saying his name too many times.

There are many different pronouns - here are some examples:

you, me, he, she, it, I, him, her, his, hers, we, they, themselves, theirs

In this activity, we can practise replacing nouns with pronouns to improve our writing.

Let's get started.