What are some difficult subject-verb agreement errors?

This is the fourth and final chapter about Subject-Verb Agreement. To complete this reader, read each chapter carefully and then unlock and complete our materials to check your understanding.

– Discuss how subject-verb agreement errors can be avoided

– Introduce seven difficult subject-verb agreement errors

– Provide examples of each error type to guide the learner

Chapter 4

The final chapter for this topic should help you to recognise the remaining subject-verb agreement errors that may be limiting your fluency in English. The following seven error types might be more difficult to spot than those in the previous chapter, but they’re still easy enough to fix once you know how.

1. Collective Nouns

There is a certain type of noun such as ‘staff’ or ‘family’ which represents a group or collective, and these nouns can cause problems for learners of English when attempting agree subjects with verbs. Ultimately, these collective nouns may be either singular or plural depending on what they’re referring to (as well as the writer or speaker’s intention). This is shown in the following examples: