Writing: Pronoun-antecedent agreement — Example

- [Instructor] A crate of honeybees arrived at my house by accident, so I took them immediately to animal control. All right, so what is this pronoun them trying to refer to? 'Cause it might be tempting to say that it's referring to the honeybees, but the subject of this first part, this first clause of this sentence right over here, they didn't say honeybees arrived at my house. They say a crate of honeybees. So the subject here is actually singular, it's a crate, a crate, this right over here is singular. So when we use the pronoun, we also want the singular form. And you could try it out by replacing it with the word that it's referring to. A crate of honeybees arrived at my house by accident, so I took the crate immediately to animal control. So instead of the crate, I wouldn't say them, I would say it. I would replace the plural pronoun with the singular, with the singular pronoun. So I took it immediately to animal control. And this is a very, this is one that'll trip many people up many times because you see a singular thing that contains many things, and so you might say, okay, well, I'm talking about a lot of honeybees, so I'd wanna use plural. Well, that would be the case if we just said honeybees arrived at my house by accident, so I took them immediately to animal control. That would actually be okay, but we're not talking about honeybees arriving. We're talking about a crate, one crate of honeybees arriving. And so the pronoun here is referring to that one crate so it should be it.