First, second and third person (4)

If clear writing is your goal, be consistent with grammatical person (first, second and third person). When you begin a passage in one person, stay in that person until the end of the passage. If you switch person within a passage, you risk confusing your readers.

An example of the risk of switching person

A good example of the risk recently appeared on the JibberJobber blog:

“If you are not getting value out of LinkedIn, I’d seriously try and figure out what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong.”

The writer starts out in second person (“If you are not getting…”). He then introduces the first person with a subjunctive verb (“I’d seriously try” = “I would seriously try”) and then reverts to second person (“what you are doing right”), all in one sentence. It almost sounds as if the writer were offering to directly help the reader edit his LinkedIn profile.

But I am guessing that the writer means to say this:

If I were you and I were not getting value out of LinkedIn, I would seriously try to figure out what I was doing right and what I was doing wrong.

That rewrite is logically valid and grammatical; however, it is cumbersome. A smoother and more direct approach would be to eliminate the subjunctive and write something like this:

If you’re not getting value out of LinkedIn, try to figure out what you’re doing right and wrong.

It’s shorter, cleaner and clearer than the original.

The Takeaway: When you begin a passage in one grammatical person (first, second or third person), stay in that person until the end of the passage. If you switch person, you risk confusing your readers. Review the pronoun section in your grammar book; learn first person, second person and third person so thoroughly that you will jar yourself awake whenever you accidentally switch person.