Most students in my classes know that subjects and verbs should
agree.
Unfortuntately, few who make errors in subject-verb agreement
in their writing have any techniques for spotting those errors
so they can correct them.
Teaching writing to students who habitually make agreement errors
requires you to give them a simple strategy for figuring out whether
a sentence they have written contains such an error.
For students whose native language is English, the following
strategy should not be difficult. The strategy builds on the so-called
given grammar that native
English speakers absorb unconsciously.
If you are teaching students whose primary language is something
other than English, you must use different techniques appropriate
to their intuitive understanding of grammar.
Normal grammatical order
Normal English sentence order is
subject > verb > object
or
subject > verb > subject complement
Those grammatical elements appear in left-to-right order
in sentences. All native English speakers know that left-to-right
order. However, your students may not realize they know the order
until you point it out to them.
Students who recognize the normal sentence pattern will look
for the subject toward the right of a sentence (or main
clause) instead of on its left.
Thinking a grammatical subject is a single word contributes
to subject verb agreement errors.
If you want students to get subject verb agreement right, you
have cure them of assuming the subject will be a single word and
help them find the subjects
of verbs.
S-V error identification
The trick to identifying errors in subject verb agreement is
to isolate the subjects.
Linguist Rei R. Noguchi in his book Grammar and the Teaching
of Writing shows how to identify the subjects of sentences correctly
by two simple techniques that native English speakers know intuitively.
These techniques are the sentence tag and the yes-no sentence.
Use tag, yes-no sentence to isolate
Let me show you how the sentence tag and yes-no question work.
First, here is the original sentence:
Original sentence:
Boys usually prefer sports
to knitting.
Now here is the tag sentence:
Tag sentence:
Boys usually prefer sports
to knitting, don't they?
As you can see, the tag sentence keeps the original sentence intact,
but adds a little inquiry tag at the end.
Now here is the yes-no sentence:
Yes-no sentence: Don't boys usually
prefer sports to knitting?
With the help of these two sentences, students will be able to
see they have achieved subject verb agreement in sentences they
wrote themselves.
Check S-V agreement, example 1
Let's take a sentence and see how to check it for subject verb
agreement errors. Here is the original sentence:
Internet users, like my friend Jim, a
small businessman who is building a website, has learned to
use advanced search.
Students will write the tag sentence one of two ways:
Tag sentence A: Internet users, like my
friend Jim, a small businessman who is building a website, has
learned to use advanced search, haven't they?
OR
Tag sentence B: Internet users, like my
friend Jim, a small businessman who is building a website, has
learned to use advanced search, hasn't he?
If students' ears don't tell them something is wrong (and many
students won't get it), the yes-no sentence which comes next will
be a red flag.
Yes-no sentence: Has Internet users, like
my friend Jim, a small businessman who is building a website,
learned to use advanced search?
Just because students hear the problem, doesn't mean they will
know how to fix it. You have to make sure they understand
which word in the original sentence is the subject and which the
verb. Otherwise, they could correct the sentence to this:
Internet user, like my friend Jim, a small
businessman who is building a website, has learned to use advanced
search.
That correction gets rid of the
subject verb agreement error, but produces a sentence that
substandard.
Check S-V agreement, example 2
Students often have difficulty with subject verb agreement when
sentences are lengthy, as in this example:
Original sentence:
The needs of his clients to sell their property in a timely
manner and at the best possible price is Don's first concern
when listing a property.
Students might write the tag sentence one of two ways, depending
on what they think the grammatical subject is:
Tag sentence A:
The needs of his clients to sell their property in a timely
manner and at the best possible price is Don's first concern
when listing a property, isn't it?
OR
Tag sentence B: The needs of his
clients to sell their property in a timely manner and at the
best possible price is Don's first concern when listing a property,
aren't they?
When students write the yes-no sentence, they put what they think
is the verb and its subject together. they will either use a singular
verb, as is done here:
Yes-no sentence A :
Isn't the needs of his clients to sell their property in a timely
manner and at the best possible price Don's first concern when
listing a property?
Or they will use a plural verb as is done here:
Yes-no sentence B:
Aren't the needs of his clients to sell their property in a
timely manner and at the best possible price Don's first concern
when listing a property?
The yes-no sentence, shows the subject to be the plural noun needs.
That means the verb also needs to be plural. So the original sentence
should be edited to read this way:
The needs of his clients to sell their
property in a timely manner and at the best possible price are
Don's first concern when listing a property.
Be careful you identify correctly specifically what it is the
student does not know. Like doctors, grammarians must be sure
they know the cause of the symptoms they see.
Still more to learn about agreement
The simple technique shown here isn't going to fix every subject
verb agreement error even of native English speakers. They will
still need to learn:
-
Rules that govern agreement when the subject is compound.
-
What words function as collective nouns.
-
Singular words that appear to be plural.
Learning those rules is much
easier after students can identify the words that are the subjects
of the sentences they write.
Published 16-May-2009; updated
15-Jun-2010
