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Can I say "I sent her a message about"? I'm asking it because I saw on Google there are only 7000 results.

I have two questions about this issue:

  1. Should it not be very common sentence, or maybe there is another way -more common- to express this idea?

  2. Is it correct to say "I sent her message about" without inserting something after the word "about"?

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  • Do you mean 'message'? and I think context is needed. If you're following up on a message sent earlier by speaking to the recipient directly then "I sent you a message earlier" is more appropriate.
    – mkennedy
    Commented Dec 11, 2014 at 23:21
  • Are you sure you Googled it correctly? I'm finding almost 7,000 results for "I sent her a message about". That phrasing sounds fine to me.
    – J.R. ♦
    Commented Dec 12, 2014 at 8:36
  • Yes, you are right. Maybe I wrote "massage"... In any case, is it correct to say "I sent her a message about" (without inserting something after the word "about"). By the way, 7000 results is it not few? it should be very common sentence. not?
    – Virtuous Legend
    Commented Dec 12, 2014 at 8:40
  • You sent her a message about what? It's not a complete sentence as you've written it. What are you trying to express by including "about" instead of just saying "I sent her a message."?
    – ColleenV
    Commented Dec 18, 2014 at 21:37
  • I thought it very strange that you only received 7,000 hits on Google, so I checked for myself and... for "I sent her a message about" there are 21,400 results, but in Google Books only 11 hits. It's always better to check the grammaticality of expressions using GBooks, the results are more helpful and reliable.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Dec 1, 2016 at 11:13

2 Answers 2

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The main problem is that you probably mean "I sent her a message about [insert some topic here]". A massage is what you call it when someone rubs your body to relax your muscles. You do not usually send someone a massage (I suppose you might be able to hire a massage therapist to go to someone's house as a gift...but other than that...). here is an adverb (that is, it modifies a verb) meaning that the action is taking place in your immediate location (it is raining here, there are a lot of loud noises here). her is the appropriate pronoun for referring to a female.

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No, I sent her a message about is not a complete sentence.

The reason is: about functions here as a preposition, introducing a prepositional phrase. The word about says to the listener that what's coming next is the topic of the message. It's as if the word about promises the listener that the sentence will say the topic of the message, and then the sentence breaks the promise.

To complete the sentence, you would say something like this:

I sent her a message about dinner.

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  • maybe "about THE dinner". The word which comes after "about" needs an article. not?
    – Virtuous Legend
    Commented Dec 12, 2014 at 9:50
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    @Dory About doesn't require its object to have an article. It depends on the object. "A message about dinner" would likely mean tonight's dinner. "A message about the dinner" would mean a special dinner that you've been talking about. "A message about a dinner" would mean a dinner that hasn't been mentioned in the conversation yet.
    – Ben Kovitz
    Commented Dec 12, 2014 at 10:22
  • Both of your examples are with articles: a dinner or the dinner - are articles (yes, two kinds of articles of course). If I understand your things properly, you say that it's correct to say "about dinner" without article.
    – Virtuous Legend
    Commented Dec 12, 2014 at 11:00
  • @Dory Yes. All three versions are correct and meaningful. The meanings are slightly different.
    – Ben Kovitz
    Commented Dec 12, 2014 at 11:56
  • Thank you for the help. I think I missed the meaning of the third version (without an article).
    – Virtuous Legend
    Commented Dec 12, 2014 at 12:03

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