Guidance: Read from the Inside Out

      Clauses beginning with who or whom can be independent questions ("Whom should we invite?"), or they can function as adjectives or nouns within a larger sentence. As adjectives, they follow and modify nouns (and sometimes pronouns), as in "the man who arrived last" or "the man to whom the letter was addressed." If you want to study adjectival clauses before going forward, click on "Relative Clauses" above. As nouns, wh- clauses appear where nouns appear, mainly as objects of verbs or prepositions, as in "I wonder who's kissing her now." Clauses with the pronouns whoever and whomever function exclusively as nouns.
      Choosing between who and whom depends only on the internal structure of the clause, never on how it functions in the larger sentence, but writers can become confused about where the boundaries are between the embedded sentence and the larger one, the "host," so to speak. This confusion makes it hard to see that "the man from whom we heard the story" and "the man from who knows where" are both correct. "Whom" is almost dead in popular speech, so a person who uses it is asking to be seen as educated, and for this reason it is especially embarrassing to use it where it does not belong. This "hypercorrect" error occurs most often in wh- clauses used as nouns.
      This exercise may help you to avoid this boobytrap. We will begin with whoever and whomever clauses because they are always used as nouns. You will examine how these embedded clauses are formed, choosing the right pronoun by learning to ignore the host sentence. This is reading "from the inside out."