Written Communication and Language Usage
What to master
Subject–verb agreement, pronoun reference and agreement, parallelism, misplaced and dangling modifiers, tense consistency, punctuation (commas, semicolons, apostrophes), and clear, concise sentence construction.
Traps that appear
- Interrupting phrases: in "The list of items is long," the verb agrees with "list," not "items." Strip the phrase to find the true subject.
- Dangling modifiers: "Walking to work, the rain started" wrongly implies the rain was walking. The modifier must attach to the right noun.
- Faulty parallelism: items in a list must share grammatical form - "reading, writing, and to edit" should be "reading, writing, and editing."
- Ambiguous pronouns: "When the manager met the clerk, she was late" - who is "she"? Replace with a clear noun.
- Comma splices: two independent clauses need a semicolon, a period, or a conjunction - not just a comma.
Rule of thumb
Read the sentence without the interrupting phrase to check agreement. For any list or comparison, confirm every element matches in form. Prefer the shortest option that is fully grammatical and unambiguous.
Worked example
"Each of the students have a book" is wrong: the subject is "Each" (singular), so it should be "Each of the students has a book."