Grammaring: The Art of Grammar (With Style!)

By CG Wheeler

Need to brush up on your grammar and writing but don't want to be bored to death? Me either. This little book puts together clear, concise explanations behind grammar, in an entertaining way that I gleaned from over 10 years of teaching.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CG Wheeler
• Release date: Dec 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386988854

Book preview

Agreement

Agreement is an important way to bring consistency to your writing. Whenever I think of agreement, and often when I’ve taught students, I remember watching Sesame Street as a kid. The show would have a game where one of these things was not like the others. They would show a picture of a baseball, a basketball, a football, and a vase of flowers. Now, which one of these didn’t belong? I wonder . . .

Yep, you guessed it, the vase of flowers. Agreement is like this, too, in that you want consistency in your perspective. It comes into play in three primary areas: number, person, and tense. We’ll talk about all three.

Number

First, we’ll talk about number—one, or more than one. It sounds pretty straightforward at first glance. If you have a singular subject (noun), then you need a singular verb. If you have a plural subject, then you need a plural verb.  Here are some examples:

Mark picks flowers every spring and takes them to his mother.

In this sentence, Mark is the subject or character, there’s just one of him, and he picks and takes (verbs).

The flowers smell nice and brighten the room with their assortment of color.

This time we have a plural subject (flowers) and plural verbs (smell, brighten). We wouldn’t say smells or brightens in this case because we’re talking about more than one.

With singular verbs, often a good clue that it’s singular is that it ends in s (in present tense, anyway). This is the opposite for nouns. A number of plural nouns end in s, while with verbs, it’s often the singular verbs that end in s. This doesn’t apply to every case, but is a common pattern.

Here’s where agreement in number (one or more than one) can get tricky: adding prepositions/prepositional phrases. Let me give you another example:

Each of the dogs (has/have) its own collar.

What’s the correct answer? Is it has or have?

Most people would say have as their choice, and at first look, it sounds reasonable. Dogs are plural, the verb have is plural, so these two should go together, right? Dogs have . . .

However, dogs is not the subject, but the object of a prepositional phrase (for more on prepositional phrases, please see the appendix section referring to Parts of Speech). Of the dogs is the complete phrase. The subject of this sentence is actually each, which is singular, so Each has its own collar. If you missed that each is the subject, its is also singular and should reinforce the agreement of number.

Another common example might look like this:

If an employee wants to park on the street, they need to get a permit.

Notice that the sentence begins with employee (singular) and ends with they (plural). This substitution is quite common, but technically incorrect. One way to fix this would be to say "If an employee wants to park on the street, he or she needs to get a permit, though this can be awkward and wordy. A better option would be: If employees want to park on the street, they need to get permits."

So here’s a tip on how to tell whether the verb should be singular or plural: before you answer this, first identify all the prepositional phrases in the sentence (prepositional phrases can be identified as anywhere a cat can go) and put parentheses around them. Next, reread the sentence without the prepositional phrases in the sentence. The true subject should quickly become apparent because the prepositional phrases are no longer in the way, which will help you identify whether you need a singular or plural verb.

Person

The second kind of agreement in writing has to do with person. By person, I mean first person, second, or third. This may or may not sound familiar, so I’d like to give examples:

First person: I, me, we, us

Second person: you, y’all

Third person: he, she, it, they, them.

To understand these groups a bit better, I’d like to talk about when we use each form in writing.

For first person, I like to describe this as being an actor on stage. When he was a kid, Ron Howard played the character of Opie in The Andy Griffith Show. Later, he would play Richie Cunningham on Happy Days. In both of these shows, Ron Howard was an actor. You could see his character interacting with others on the show.

In writing, we tend to see the 1st person perspective in narratives, stories where we’re the main character, or one of many characters interacting with others. We also see it in essays and personal emails. This perspective creates a sense of intimacy. I’m on one end of the conversation, telling you my story, sharing my thoughts. It’s the closest thing to having a conversation with each other on paper.

For third person (yes, I skipped second person. I’ll come back to it later), I like to describe this perspective as being the director. The writer chooses what we see, but we don’t actually see him or her as a character in the story. Let’s go back to the Ron Howard analogy. After Ron Howard grew up, he began directing movies and TV shows (Arrested Development, A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13, and Cocoon). We don’t actually see Ron Howard in these movies, but he’s directing from behind the camera: we see his vision, his perspective. Many research papers and articles are written in third person. The writer’s style and perspective comes through, but the focus is on the material being covered, not on the writer as a character.

I saved the second person point of view for last. The second person you is used in instructional manuals, how to’s, and is generally more directive (I want you to do something). While this is helpful in directive settings, the second person perspective is the least used of the three. Coming from the instructional you perspective can raise walls or alienate the reader. If the writer says, You think this and the reader thinks, No, actually I DON’T think that, the writer runs the risk of losing the connection with the audience. It also tends to be more acceptable to share an idea from an I perspective (This is what I observed, this is how X made me feel when you did this). It’s hard to argue with personal experience or perspective, so many writers tend to favor a first person perspective over second.

Here’s where agreement comes in. Let me give you an example:

If an