So far we have looked at how sentences are constructed and how to correct faultily constructed sentences (incomplete sentences--fragments; conflated sentences--comma splice/run on). Now we are going to shift our attention to focus on individual words within sentences. The two most important words in any sentence are the subject and verb.

If I say that two people are in agreement, I mean that they are saying the same thing. If I say they are in disagreement, I mean that they are saying different things. One of my students once showed me a little poem about "two dead boys" who get into a fight. One of the lines reads, "back to back they faced each other." Another line reads "they drew their swords and shot each other." The whole poem is playing around with disagreements. As a result, while it is clever and entertaining, it doesn't make sense (part of the entertainment lies in our pleasure at the contradictions in the poem). When the subject and verb in a sentence do not agree, the sentence doesn't make sense (even though we may be able to figure out what is meant).

If we use pronouns with a verb like work, we see the following pattern:

Person	Singular Pronoun	Singular verb		Plural pronoun	Plural verb
1st (self/with someone)	I	work		We	work
2nd (to someone/thing)	You	work		You	work
3rd (about someone/ place/thing)	He She It	works		They	work

Notice that in 3rd person singular the verb changes to works. Since in 3rd person, we are talking about someone, someplace, or something, we can replace the pronouns with any noun (a person, place, or thing). For instance,

Singular		Plural
The car works		The cars work

So, to make a noun plural, we add an s; to make a verb plural, we take away an s so that only the noun or the verb (but not both) have an s. We call this the one s rule.

The one-s rule says that between the noun and the verb, only one can have an s ending. However, there are some situations where a subject can be plural without necessarily having an s ending.

• Irregular nouns

  • Some common nouns do not form plurals by adding s. For instance,

    child	children
    man	men
    mouse	mice
    goose	geese

  • Nouns borrowed from other languages may follow the rules for forming plurals in that language. For instance, the following words come from Latin:

    focus	foci	Latin masculine
    nebula	nebulae	Latin feminine
    medium	media	Latin neuter

• Compound nouns

  • When two or more nouns are joined by and, the verb is plural as if the nouns were added together (and shows addition).

    Bill and Joe drive to school.

  • When two or more nouns are joined by or or nor, the verb agrees with the noun closest to it (or and nor show options)

    My parents or Joe takes me to school. Joe or my parents take me to school.

  Sometimes a noun or verb can end in s but not sound like it ends in s.

  • When words that end with unvocalized consonants (such as f, p, t) are made plurals, the s sounds like s.
    • lips
    • pots
    • gifts

  • When words that end with vocalized consonants (such as v, b, d) or liquids (such as r, m, l) are made plurals, the s sounds like z.
    • cars
    • bills
    • bombs
    • dogs
    • mobs

  • When words that end with consonants which already sound like s are made plurals, es is added to the end of the word (unless a silent e is already at the end of the word), and the word sounds like it ends in sez.
    • kisses
    • boxes
    • places
    • houses