Language and Grammar in Context
The concepts you must control
Grammar questions test sentence completeness (subject and finite verb), agreement (subject–verb, pronoun–antecedent), tense and aspect consistency, sentence types (simple, compound, complex), clause types (main, subordinate, relative), punctuation (commas, semicolons, colons, apostrophes, quotation marks), modifiers (avoiding dangling and misplaced ones), parallel structure, and word class (knowing what a word does in a sentence, not just what it means).
Traps that appear in questions
- Long subjects. “The list of items on the desk was long.” The head noun is list, not items.
- Interrupting phrases. Words between subject and verb do not change agreement.
- Apostrophe confusion. Its = possessive; it's = it is. Students' = plural possessive; student's = singular possessive.
- Comma splices. Two main clauses need a full stop, semicolon or conjunction - not a comma alone.
- Dangling modifiers. The opening phrase must describe the subject of the main clause.
- Shifts in tense or person partway through a sentence.
Worked example
“Walking to school, the rain soaked Maya.” The opening phrase describes Maya, but the subject is rain, so the modifier dangles. Repair: “Walking to school, Maya was soaked by the rain.”
Second example: “Neither the teachers nor the headteacher was informed.” With neither…nor, the verb agrees with the nearer subject (headteacher), so singular was is correct.
Rule of thumb
Strip the sentence to its bones: find the subject, find the verb, check they agree and that the tense matches the rest of the passage. Then check every apostrophe and comma against a rule you can name.