In theatre, we talk about the cardinal sin of “popping pronouns.” This is when an actor emphasizes a pronoun instead of a verb, noun, or adjective.
To illustrate this idea, I’ll borrow one of my favorite lines from “The Negotiator,” starring Samuel L. Jackson. He plays a police negotiator whose partner has been murdered, and he is being framed for it. He has taken hostages in an effort to clear his name (it’s complicated.) Anyway, here’s the line:
“You gave me a way out when you shut the heat off.”
If Samuel L. Jackson pops the pronouns, it reads like this:
“YOU gave me a way out when YOU shut the heat off!”
Actors (and public speakers) sometimes pop pronouns when they’re trying to get across the idea that the other person is important to what’s going on. The harder you hit that pronoun, though, the harder it is to understand the sentence as a whole.
The emphasis on the YOU makes everything else secondary.
Of course, Samuel L. Jackson is a pro, so he does the line like this:
“You GAVE me a way out when you shut the heat off!”
From this line reading, we understand that it’s not about who gave him a way out, it’s about the fact that he knows how he’s escaping from the building. This delivery advances the plot, letting us know that he’s a couple steps ahead.
Unless you are directly comparing two or more things (“I traveled to her house instead of his this Thanksgiving”), the word you should emphasize is not a pronoun. They can hold their own without your help!
