5 exercises — practise choosing who versus whom correctly in formal technical documents.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses "who" as the subject of the relative clause in a formal handover document?
"The engineer who reviewed the pull request approved the deployment" is correct: "who" performs the action "reviewed", so it functions as the subject of the relative clause and "who" is required, not "whom". Option B wrongly uses the object form "whom" for a subject role. Option C confuses "who's" (who is / who has) with the relative pronoun. Option D combines two errors.
2 / 5
Choose the sentence that correctly uses "whom" because it is the object of the verb in a formal stakeholder report.
"The vendor whom we contacted last week..." is correct in the most formal register: "whom" is the object of "contacted" ("we contacted whom"), which calls for the object form. Option B uses the informal but widely accepted "who"; for a strictly formal register, "whom" is preferred. Option C misuses "whom" as if it were the subject of "contacted". Option D uses "which", reserved for things, not people.
3 / 5
Which sentence correctly places "whom" directly after a preposition in a formal RFC, as required in that construction?
"...to whom the proposal was submitted..." is correct: immediately after a preposition ("to"), only the object form "whom" is grammatical — "to who" is never acceptable in formal written English. Option B incorrectly uses "who" after the preposition. Option C strands the preposition, which is acceptable informally but weaker in this fronted, formal construction, and adds an awkward tag. Option D drops the auxiliary "was", breaking the passive construction.
4 / 5
Select the sentence that correctly identifies when "who" is required despite appearing to follow a verb, because it is the subject of an embedded clause.
"We need to identify who actually approved this configuration change" is correct: "who" is the subject of the embedded clause "who approved this configuration change", so the subject form is required even though the whole clause is the object of "identify". Option B wrongly substitutes "whom" for a subject role. Options C and D introduce further errors combining contractions and redundant tags.
5 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses "whoever" (not "whomever") because it functions as the subject of its own clause in a formal access-control policy?
"Access should be granted to whoever completes the security training" is correct: even though "whoever" follows the preposition "to", it is the subject of "completes", and the whole clause "whoever completes the security training" is the object of "to" — the internal subject role determines "whoever", not the preceding preposition. Option B incorrectly uses the object form "whomever" for a subject role. Option C duplicates the pronoun incorrectly. Option D wrongly splits "whoever" into two words.