The Community Garden Notice: Finding the Real Subject
At a tutoring session, a student brings a draft notice for a community garden. The draft contains four sentences: (1) "The group of volunteers who signed up in March meet at the north gate on Saturdays." (2) "Each of the raised beds need to be watered twice a week." (3) "Neither the coordinator nor the volunteers has received the new key." (4) "The tools that the city donated was stored in the shed." The student insists the sentences "sound fine" because in every case the verb sits right next to a plural noun. The session lasts 30 minutes, and the student wants a reusable rule for tomorrow's test, not just four corrected sentences.
1. For each of the four sentences, decide whether the verb is correct, and state the rule the student can apply to new sentences.
Read the worked answer
Sentence 1 - incorrect. The grammatical subject is group (singular); of volunteers is a prepositional phrase and who signed up in March is a relative clause, neither of which changes the head noun. → meets.
Sentence 2 - incorrect. Each is an indefinite pronoun and is always singular, even when followed by of the raised beds. → needs.
Sentence 3 - incorrect. With neither … nor, the verb agrees with the subject nearer to it: volunteers is plural. → have received.
Sentence 4 - incorrect. Here the head noun is tools (plural); that the city donated modifies it and contains its own singular verb, which is correct. → were stored.
Reusable rule: find the head noun of the subject, ignore everything between it and the verb, then check the verb. The four traps here - prepositional phrase, indefinite pronoun, correlative conjunction, relative clause - are the ones the test reuses.
2. The draft also says: "Every volunteer should bring their own gloves and leave their tools in the shed." The student asks whether this is an error. Give a defensible answer for a printed community notice, with two revisions.
Read the worked answer
It is not a grammar error in modern usage - singular they/their after every is standard in speech and increasingly in edited prose. But a printed notice from a neighborhood association is a formal, edited context where some readers will read their after every volunteer as a mismatch between singular and plural.
Because the sentence can be fixed without loss, fix it. Two options:
- Make the subject plural: "Volunteers should bring their own gloves and leave their tools in the shed." This keeps
theirand removes the mismatch entirely - the cleanest choice. - Keep
everyand repeat the possessive: "Every volunteer should bring his or her own gloves…" Correct, but clunky for a notice.
Recommendation: option 1. On a test, if one answer choice makes the subject plural and another patches in his or her, the plural rewrite is usually the intended answer because it is both grammatical and natural.