In the latest of my posts on grammar, I look at our essential friend, the pronoun.

At it's simplest, the pronoun is a type of shorthand, indicating a noun that's previously been mentioned or is known in some way.

There are quite a few different types of noun, such as

 Possessive pronouns - words that indicate ownership, such as mine, ours, hers, theirs etc

 Personal pronouns - the collection of pronouns in English that play the role of demonstrate the person, gender, number etc. For example, he, she, him and her.

A relative pronoun is used for connecting a phrase or clause to a pronoun or noun.

The reflective pronoun is usually used to follow or precede the noun to which it refers. For example 'I treated myself'.

Indefinite pronouns are can be partitives, for example 'anyone', 'either' and 'someone'. They can also be assertive, such as 'something' or quantifies like 'many'.

Demonstrative pronouns are the pronouns used for demonstrative adjectives, such as 'that' or 'those'.  However, the difference is in the structure of the sentence.

The place of the noun phrase is taken by the demonstrative pronoun.#

One trend to be aware of is that pronouns used for gender have come under increasing scrutiny with greater gender equality. Check out this excellent guide to gender neutral pronouns. For more information, check out these pronoun examples and this list of pronouns.