Ambiguous Agreements

One of the most common mistakes people make when they’re putting together a sentence is to choose forms of words that don’t agree with each other. When we say “agree” here, we mean that the words have to correspond in both person and number. “Agreeing in person” means that a first-person noun such as “I” needs a first-person verb such as “am” to make its life complete (rather than a third-person verb like “are”). “Agreeing in number” means that a singular subject such as “lobster” would like nothing better than to settle down with a singular verb such as “is” (rather than a plural verb such as “are”).

Most sentences present few problems with agreement; we don’t have to think about it much. If you grew up speaking English, for example, it probably never would occur to you to say, I are sure that lobster are poisonous. Instead, you’d say, I am sure that lobster is poisonous, and your grammar would be correct, even if your concern about the lobster was not.

People run into trouble with agreement only when their sentences start to get complicated. By far the most common error happens when a sentence’s subject is modified by so many little phrases that you forget what the subject is—which brings us to our first agreement error: subjects with complex modifiers.