7 English Grammar Rules You Should Know

1. Subject-Verb Agreement

Use singular verbs for singular subjects and plural verbs with plural subjects. A verb should
agree with its subject, not with an intervening modifying phrase or clause: “The box of cards is on
the shelf.”

Singular verbs are appropriate with the following parts of speech:

• indefinite pronouns: “Everyone is here”

• uncountable nouns: “The rain has stopped”
• inverted subjects: “Where is the car?”
• subjects plural in form but singular in meaning: “Statistics [the academic subject] is boring,” but
“Statistics [sets of data] are sometimes misleading”
• compound subjects: “Breaking and entering is different than burglary”
• the constructions “the only one of those (blank) who . . . ,” “the number of (blank) . . . ,” “every
(blank) . . . ,” and “many a (blank) . . .”
• a measurement when considered as a unit: “Three months is a long time to wait”
• collective nouns: “The team is ready for the game” (but if referring to all individual members of a
collective, reword for clarity, as in “The members of the team stand behind the coach’s decision”

2. Nominative and Objective Pronouns and Reflexive Pronouns

Pronouns are sometimes used erroneously when a phrase contains more than one object. For
example, although “My sister and I are coming” is correct because “My sister and I” is the subject
and therefore the nominative ​I​ is appropriate, “He invited my sister and I” is wrong because “my
sister” and ​I​ are the objects, and the pronoun should be in objective form (​me,​ not ​I​).

Reflexive pronouns, compound of a pronoun and ​-self​, are correct only if they are associated
with an antecedent pronoun, as in “I did it myself”; “Contact John or myself” is an error because
there is no previous reference to the self-identifying person.

3. Dangling Participles

When a sentence begins with an incomplete phrase or clause, the person, place, or thing it
modifies must immediately follow it as the subject of the main clause, or the introductory phrase
or clause must be rewritten. For example, in “Rolling down the slope, my eyes beheld a curious
sight,” the writer intends to express that he or she was rolling down the slope, but the subject of
the sentence is “my eyes,” leading to the impression that the rolling was performed by the eyes,
not the individual. To resolve the problem, amend the sentence to “Rolling down the slope, I
beheld a curious sight” or “As I rolled down the slope, my eyes beheld a curious sight.”

4. Misplaced Modifiers
A modifying phrase should immediately follow the word or phrase it modifies. For example, in the
sentence “I overheard that they’re getting married in the restroom,” because “in the restroom”
follows “getting married,” the reader is given the impression that the nuptials will take place in the
restroom. However, “in the restroom” modifies the subject, “I overheard,” so those two phrases
should be adjacent: “I overheard in the restroom that they’re getting married.”

5. Incomplete Sentences

Many justifications exist for sentence fragments, but they are best used judiciously and in such a
way that it is clear to the reader that the writer is deliberately writing an incomplete sentence, and
not obliviously making an error.

6. Phrase and Clause Lists

In-line lists, those presented within the syntax of a sentence, should be structured to be
grammatically consistent. For example, the sentence “Insights are actionable, adaptive, and help
achieve the desired objectives” is erroneously constructed because ​are​ serves the first adjective
and ​help​ is associated with ​achieve,​ but ​adaptive​ cannot share ​are​ with ​actionable​ unless a
conjunction rather than a comma separates them: “Insights are actionable and adaptive and help
achieve the desired objectives.”

If a sentence, unlike in this revision, is to remain in list form, each list element must follow parallel
construction, as in the revision of “Teapots may be embellished with landscapes, scenes from
paintings, historical figures, or natural elements such as orchids or bamboo” to “Teapots may be
embellished with landscapes, scenes from paintings, portraits of historical figures, or depictions
of natural elements such as orchids or bamboo,” where each element must refer to
representations of phenomena rather than the phenomena themselves.

7. Restrictive and Nonrestrictive Phrases and Clauses

Although the use of ​which​ in a sentence such as “She prefers a job which is more stable” is
technically correct in American English (and ubiquitous in British English), careful writers will help
their readers by maintaining this distinction between ​which​ and ​that​: Use the former with a
nonrestrictive phrase “She prefers a job, which is more stable than freelance work” (what follows
the comma and ​which​ is not essential to the sentence) and use the latter with a restrictive phrase
“She prefers a job that is more stable” (“that is more stable” is an essential part of the sentence).