Verb Errors

Verbs are a word used to describe an act, occurrence, or mode of being. Some examples of verbs are run, jump, dance, or sing. Some verbs are less obvious, such as am, was, were, or happen. Verbs are a lot of fun and impacts the meanings of sentences greatly. Because of this, we want to avoid common verb errors.

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Some common verb errors include the following:

Shifts in Time

Every verb has a tense, or the action's time frame. Common tenses include past, present, and future: walk, walked, and will walk. While writing, we want to avoid shifting in time. For example, if we are writing a sentence, paragraph, and/or essay in present tense, we don't want to switch to past tense unless there's an acceptable, specific, reason.

Incorrect: He walked into the house and opened the fridge. Suddenly, he realizes he is not alone.

Correct: He walked into the house and opened the fridge. Suddenly, he realized he was not alone.

An acceptable shift: Drunk driving is the leader cause of automobile accidents. Last year, more than 16,000 people died as a result of drunk driving. ("Last year" shows that it's going to shift into past tense.

Subject/Verb Number Agreement

The subject of your sentence should match your verb. This means that if you have a singular subject, you should also have a singular verb. Most of the time this is pretty obvious.

For example, "They is happy!" is incorrect, while "They are happy!" is correct.

However, sometimes it's harder to tell if they match. Some more difficult examples are the following:

Words that end in -body, -one, and -thing are singular.

Correct: Everyone is happy. (Everyone, even though referring to more than one person, is mentioning every single person).

Incorrect: Everyone are happy.

Prepositional phrases are not subjects. When looking at subjects, try to get rid of the prepositional phrase.

Correct: A group of kids is going to the playground.

Incorrect: A group of kids are going to the playground.

It would be "is" and not "are" because "a group" is the subject of the sentence, not "of kids," which is a prepositional phrase.