Solution
The first step in solving subject-verb agreement problems is to correctly identify the subject and the verb. This sounds easy, but many times, other words and/or phrases come between the subject and the verb. Look at the following example:
Obviously, you'd want to eat the pies, not the shelf, but the subject of the sentence is shelf. Once you've identified the subject, if you apply the
, you'll know that the verb must be looks.
The phrase of pies is a prepositional phrase, so even though pies is a noun, it's an object of the preposition and can't serve as the subject. One strategy that often helps is to put parentheses around prepositional phrases--and then ignore them--while you check for subject-verb agreement.
Now look at this example:
This sentence has an inverted sentence structure, which means that the verb comes before the subject. The same strategy applies though:
Start by finding the subject and the verb. Who is doing the action in the sentence? The answer, of course, is beasts, so beasts is the subject, even though it appears as the final word in the sentence. Now apply the
Ignore words that intervene between the subject and the verb. Find the true subject and verb, and make sure that they agree in person and number.
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