6. Possessive with Gerund

6. Possessive with Gerund
In a sentence in which a gerund (a verb functioning as a noun), not the proper noun or the pronoun preceding it, is understood to be the subject of the sentence — as in “Jane’s yelling had put us all in a bad mood” — the proper noun or pronoun (a modifying part of speech known as a determiner) should be in the possessive form. The sentence is expressing that the yelling caused the bad moods, and the genitive form Jane’s identifies the yeller.

In “Jane yelling had put us all in a bad mood,” by contrast, Jane is the subject and yelling is a verb; the implied subject is “The act of Jane.” This construction, however, is awkward; either use the construction with the gerund, or relax the sentence to something like, “When Jane yelled, it put us all in a bad mood.”