Write Beside Me: Subject/Verb Agreement

I hope to contribute regularly to this blog dubbed “Write Beside Me.” In this forum, I’ll provide tips to improve your writing. Many of the posts will provide brief grammar lessons. Here’s one now ;-)

You learned at a very early age the importance of subject/verb agreement; and when you write simple, declarative sentences, you’ll likely stay out of trouble. The more complex the sentence structure, the more prone you are to errors when aligning those subjects with their corresponding singular or plural verbs.

I’ll touch on this topic in more detail in other posts, and for today’s grammar lesson, I’ll focus on the common mistake of “misquantifying” your nouns. I’m seeing it with some regularity.

INCORRECT
Lawyers each have an iPad.

CORRECT
Each lawyer has an iPad.
All lawyers have iPads.

As you can see, the train wreck occurs when you start with a plural subject (lawyers) and follow it with a quantifier that is singular (each). Correcting the placement of the quantifier will get you on track.

I welcome your suggestions for topics, and I'm hopeful you find the information helpful.

Till next time . . . write on!