Subject-Verb Agreement
A common grammar error that students make is having subject-verb agreement problems.
- A subject-verb agreement situation refers to the plurality of the subject and the corresponding plurality of the verb.
- Both subjects and verbs must refer to the same plurality of items.
- A singular noun operating as the sentence's subject must have a singular verb. A plural subject must have a plural verb.
Verb Tense Consistency
One common mistake is to shift verb tenses throughout a piece of writing.
- When referring to texts - either primary or secondary - always refer to them using present-tense verbs.
- It is as if the action of a text exists in a forever present.
- The author "writes"; the speaker "speaks"; the character "acts". Only when referring to actual historical events should past tense verbs be used Example: World War 1 began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and scholar, Lindy Ledohowski, writes that the First World War impacts Canadians in a variety of ways to this day.
Parallelism
Parallelism refers to sentence structures where what appears before a dividing component of some sort must parallel what appears on the other side of the dividing component.
Example: I enjoy reading books and watching movies; I also enjoy eating cake.
Example: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."