Unit 1: Making Sentences Work – Agreement
This unit introduces you to number and tense agreement. In English, it is important that the number of a noun, meaning if it is singular or plural, and the timing of verbs in a sentence or paragraph, referred to as the verbs' tense, stays consistent. For example, readers would be confused if a sentence mentioned one dog, but later said "dogs", or if that dog ran while also running. In this unit, you'll learn that by knowing what tense to use and how to apply that tense to all verbs in a sentence or paragraph, you can help the reader follow along easily. Finally, you'll practice recognizing tense agreement and correcting it where it disagrees.
Completing this unit should take you approximately 3 hours.
Upon successful completion of this unit, you will be able to:
- recognize subject/verb and tense agreement
1.1: Singular and Plural Nouns Review
In English, a noun is used to show a person, a place, or a thing. If we have one noun, we call it singular. For example, dog, tree, and city are all singular nouns. If we want to show that we have more than one noun, we need to make the noun plural. For most nouns, this means adding the letter "s" to the end of the word (dog, trees). If a noun only needs "s", we call it a regular noun. For other nouns, called irregular nouns, we need to change the word's ending to make it plural (city → cities). Read the following resource to review regular and irregular singular and plural nouns.
1.2: Subject-Verb Agreement
Now that we're familiar with singular and plural nouns and verbs, we need to be sure we use nouns and verbs together correctly. When writing a sentence, we want to take care to use the same plural or singular tense to not confuse our readers. This is called "subject-verb agreement". Take the following two sentences, for example; the first one uses correct subject-verb agreement, while the second sentence makes an error in number agreement. Can you see the difference?
- The pants are too small for my brother.
- The pants is too small for my brother.
The noun "pants" is plural, so the verb needs to be plural, too. "Are" is plural, but "is" is singular, so "pants are" is the correct use of the noun and verb together.
1.3: Using Verb Tenses to Show Time
In addition to using verbs for singular and plural nouns, verbs also tell the reader when something happens. In English, a verb uses different tenses to tell the reader if it is an action happening in the past, present, or future. Read this page to review verb tenses.
1.4: Verb Tense Agreement
Just like with numbers, verbs need to agree in tense. If a sentence is talking about the past, all the verbs need to remain in the past tense. Similarly, if the sentence is talking about the present, all the verbs needs to stay in the present tense. When you have two sentences giving information about the same event, keep the verbs from both sentences in the same tense to avoid confusing the reader.
Read this page for some examples of making sure your writing stays in the appropriate tense.
Unit 1 Assessment
- Receive a grade
Take this assessment to see how well you understood this unit.
- This assessment does not count towards your grade. It is just for practice!
- You will see the correct answers when you submit your answers. Use this to help you study for the final exam!
- You can take this assessment as many times as you want, whenever you want.