Quick Subject-Verb Review

Before you can edit for agreement, identify the subject and verb that must agree in the sentence. How do you do that? Usually if you can find the verb—the action or state of being word—you can find the subject. Ask yourself, “Who or what (fill in the blank with the verb)?” The answer is the subject of the verb. Look at these examples:

• Before school every day, Ray eats 14 pancakes. verb = eats; who or what eats? Ray = subject
• Those two girls are the funniest people in the world. verb = are; who or what are? girls = subject

Note: This approach suggests that a sentence can contain only one verb, when in reality we know that a sentence can have more than one clause, and each clause has at least one subject and one verb.

Now that you have found the subject, look at it carefully. What is its number? In other words, is the subject singular or plural? This is important because the number of the subject determines the number of the verb. If a singular subject has a plural verb, you will have to change the verb to make it singular so it agrees with the subject; if a plural subject has a singular verb, the verb must be changed so that it’s plural too.

If you remember the following trick, determining whether verbs are singular or plural will be much easier: while most nouns form their plurals by adding –s or –es, that’s not the case with verbs. The quickest way to figure out whether a verb is singular or plural is to put a singular or plural personal pronoun with it. If the pronoun he or she agrees with the verb, the verb is singular; if the plural pronoun they works with the verb, the verb is also plural. For example, he smile? No, he smiles. The verb smiles is singular. They laughs? No, they laugh. The verb laugh is plural.

Practice recognizing subject-verb agreement by dragging and dropping each set of words below into the correct column. These sets of subjects and verbs either agree in number or don’t agree.