How do I Practice Verb Agreement?
Subject-verb tense agreement can be tricky. Incorrect agreement rankles the reader and harms your credibility, making it more difficult to communicate your information or argument to your reader. Whether you are a student trying to strengthen your grammar skills or writing in English as your second language, practicing subject-verb agreement is an important skill.
Instructions
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Build your skills by studying parts of speech. Thoroughly learn the basics of grammar. Study the definition of a noun (a noun is the name of a person, place, thing or idea). Familiarize yourself with collective nouns, such as "class" or "hive," which take a singular verb form even though they are followed by plural nouns. For example, "The class of students goes to lunch at noon," rather than, "The class of students go to lunch at noon." Keep a list handy if you get stuck on this.
Study irregular plural noun forms and lists. Know that "women" and "geese" are plural nouns despite not ending in an "s" and so take plural forms of verbs.
Understand that a verb is a word that shows action or being. Study sentence structure to understand that a noun that is the subject of a sentence takes a verb that must agree with it in number. A sentence or phrase with a singular noun as its subject takes the singular verb and a sentence or phrase with a plural noun as its subject takes a matching verb.
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Pick up standard style books and refer to them when in doubt. Good choices are the "AP (Associated Press) Stylebook," "Harbrace College Handbook," and "The Elements of Style" by Strunk and White.
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Learn simple proofreading symbols and use them on your first drafts. Learn to diagram sentences. This is a time-tested method that helps you dissect a sentence and determine which subjects match which verbs. It is particularly helpful when the sentence is complicated by phrases. For example, diagramming the sentence, "The number of households that depend on food stamps in the state has increased in the last year." would demonstrate that the verb "depend" is correctly used because it applies to "households" within a phrase, while the verb "has" applies to the subject "number". Get into the habit of diagramming complex sentences to double check all your grammar. Eventually, you will be able to internalize the process and not need to literally diagram.
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Catch agreement errors in headlines. Once you are well practiced in the basics, you may wish to look into the exceptions to the rules, such as notional usage: "The school of fish are eating each other." Also understand complicated compound subjects, for example: "Either that dog or those cats are going to the vet today." Scan for these uses in the media you read.
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Use online quizzes to practice agreement. Find a used bookstore or a home school curriculum source and pick up old grammar texts with exercises you can use. Try to find teacher's editions so you can check your accuracy.
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References
Resources
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