Uses of Direct & Indirect Object

An object is a noun or pronoun that gives meaning to the subject and the verb in a sentence. It often follows the subject and verb in a sentence. There are two ways of writing the objects of many verbs without changing the meaning of the sentence: direct objects and indirect objects. The indirect object may appear before the direct object without being preceded by a preposition or it may occur after the direct object, preceded by a preposition. The prepositions that are generally used in this structure are for and to.

The direct object is a person or a thing and is the first receiver of the action. On the other hand, the indirect object is an animate object or objects to whom or for whom something is done.

     Mary showed the photograph to me.
                                  ^{direct object            indirect object}

(the photograph is the direct object because the first action was that of showing the photo, and the second action, the indirect one, was to show to me.)

Although objects are basically nouns or pronouns, verbs play an important role in how the object will behave. There are some particular verbs that are allowed for object transformation (direct to indirect or indirect to direct). Here are some of the verbs that do transform.

All of these verbs must be followed by either the preposition for or to. If we want to the transformation which means exactly the same as the sentence with the original preposition happens, then we need to understand the following rules.

Examples of direct and indirect objects: