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7. Agreements

    1. The different parts of a sentence have to agree with each other

      1. The subject and the verb have to agree

        — you can’t say “he eat,” or “they eats.”

        1. When you have two or more subjects connected by “and” use a plural verb.

        2. If a subject is separated from the verb by a parenthetical expression, ignore the parenthetical expression when deciding whether to use a singular or plural verb.

    2. Using pronouns (words that stand for nouns, such as I, he, they, etc.) can be very confusing.

      1. Pronouns stay the same even when there are more than one.

        ex. If it is correct to say, “Dad gave the ball to me,” then it is correct to say, “Dad gave the ball to John and me,” NOT “John and I.”

        To check a pronoun to see if it is correct, take out the other pronouns or nouns and see if it still works.

      2. Indefinite pronouns (anyone, anybody, everyone, everybody, someone, somebody, no one, nobody, either, and neither) are always singular.

      3. A pronoun must agree with the word it stands for (called its antecedent)

        — you can’t say, “A student lost their paper.” You’d say, “A student lost his paper” or “A student lost her paper.”

        But what if you don’t know whether it’s a boy or girl? This can cause problems, because we don’t have a singular word that can mean either boys or girls. Many people use “they” when they’re talking, but it’s not correct to write it that way. Here are some solutions:

        •Technically, “he” can stand for either gender, though many females object these days.
        •You can pluralize: “Students lost their papers.”
        •You can use “his or her” or some variation, such as (s)he, though this gets tiresome quickly, so you can’t use it too often.
        •You can alternate — sometimes say he and sometimes say she.
        •Rewrite the sentence to avoid the problem: “Someone lost a paper.”

      4. When you use a plural pronoun, any objects have to be plural too, unless something is being shared.

        ex. “Their hand touched the stove.” Do they all share one hand? Or did you mean “Their hands touched the stove?”

      5. If you are using more than one pronoun together, try each one by itself to make sure it works.

        This will avoid sentences such as, "Me and her went to the store."

      6. If there is more than one pronoun, and one of them is "me" or "I," that pronoun goes last.