Hone your writing skills and never use "hone in" again. Get writing tips, have fun with words and learn something new in a one-minute read each week by signing up for Stylebot’s newsletter.
Team USA is the exception
|
The 2024 Olympics start next week, and we’re continuing our series on Olympic-themed writing tips. Last week we covered capitalization, and this week we’re discussing another subject that can be confusing and inconsistent: subject-verb agreement. We’ve told you before about how to decide whether collective nouns, such as team, take singular or plural verbs. If the group is acting as a unit, use singular verbs: The team is working to improve its penalty rate. Team names, however, take plural verbs, even when the team being named is acting as a unit: The Dallas Cowboys are going to win the game. But what would an English language rule be without exceptions? Don’t apply this rule about team names to Team USA, which takes singular verbs: Team USA is leading in the medal count. And you might have already noticed that we’ve implicitly answered another Olympic-themed question about subject-verb agreement throughout this series when we use plural verbs with “Olympics” (glance above to the first sentence of this newsletter to see what we mean). What other questions about subject-verb agreement can we help you with? Hit reply and let us know. ❤ Team Stylebot
💌 A tip a weekIf someone forwarded you this email, subscribe here to get one writing tip a week in your inbox. 💬 Get reliable, ethical writing advice at your fingertipsImproving your writing means making better choices every day. Stylebot makes it easy with our Slack, Teams and Google Chrome extensions. Try Stylebot for free today. 📝 About StylebotStylebot helps media professionals save time without sacrificing quality by answering editing questions on Slack, Microsoft Teams and Google Chrome. We're on a mission to make editing faster, easier and more fun ✨ Learn more about Stylebot or follow us Instagram, X or LinkedIn.
|
Stylebot
Hone your writing skills and never use "hone in" again. Get writing tips, have fun with words and learn something new in a one-minute read each week by signing up for Stylebot’s newsletter.
Last week's quiz question might have seemed confusing because of the lesson that preceded it about subject-verb agreement, but most of you got it right. "Neither" usually takes singular verbs, and even though "of the options" is right next to the verb, it doesn't affect the verb since it's a prepositional phrase. What writing challenges trip you up? Remember that we're happy to tackle them in this newsletter. Submit your questions here. In the meantime, here's this week's quiz: The boss said...
Most of the time, subject-verb agreement comes naturally. We don't second-guess the verbs we use in a sentence such as, "I am going to the park, and she is going to meet me there." But every now and then, as with our "couple" example from a few weeks ago, it gets tricky. You showed in last week's quiz that you're clear on the rule that you need to use "either" with "or" and "neither" with "nor." (Neither "either...nor" nor "neither...or" is correct.) But the subject-verb agreement tripped you...
We're continuing our series on either and neither this week, and you did well on the first quiz: Even though you might hear people use "either side" here, remember "either" means one or the other. You might have a tree on each side, but once you're using the plural "trees," you're probably talking about both sides. All right, like we said last week, we were easing you in with that question. There are some trickier questions when it comes to "either" and "neither." Let's try this one... Which...