Subject-Verb Agreement: A Complete Guide With Edge Cases
Complete guide to subject-verb agreement including compound subjects, collective nouns, indefinite pronouns, and the tricky edge cases everyone misses.
The exact change
"Subject-verb agreement is the silent audit of your writing. Every verb in every sentence is checking in with its subject. Most of the time the check passes. The times it fails are the times readers notice and lose trust." Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence [...] "The rule book for subject-verb agreement runs to twenty pages in most style guides, but 90 percent of errors come from failing to find the actual subject. Slow down. Strip out the modifiers. Ask what is doing the verb. The rest is detail." Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools
Grammar guides frequently describe subject-verb agreement as a kind of silent audit: readers rarely notice when it is correct, but they notice immediately when it fails, and that failure can cost the writer credibility. [...] Writing instructors such as Roy Peter Clark, author of Writing Tools, emphasize that most subject-verb agreement errors come from failing to identify the actual grammatical subject: strip out the modifiers, find what is doing the verb, and the rest is detail.
Why this is better
Unverified quote attributed to Stanley Fish. This exact quote could not be verified in How to Write a Sentence or any other indexed source.; unverified quote attributed to Roy Peter Clark. This exact quote could not be verified in Writing Tools or any other indexed source.
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