The Overcorrection Problem
After a unit on agreement and articles, 40 Class XII students take a 30-item test. Five items draw most errors: 'One of the boys ___ late' (26 correct), 'The jury ___ not reached a verdict' (9 correct), 'He is ___ honest man' (31 correct), 'She has been teaching ___ 2019' (22 correct), 'Neither the teacher nor the students ___ present' (14 correct). In a follow-up interview, 17 students say 'we were told and makes the subject plural', and 12 say 'neither/nor always takes a singular verb'. The teacher has two 35-minute periods before the next unit test and wants to avoid reteaching all five items. The department requires that remediation be data-based and that students explain the rule in their own words.
1. Choose two patterns for whole-class reteaching and explain why the others should not be whole-class priorities.
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Prioritise neither/nor and one of the boys. Neither/nor has only 14/40 correct and a clear proximity rule: the verb agrees with the nearer subject. One of the boys has 26/40 correct, but the 14 errors come from an overgeneralised rule ('and means plural'), so a short contrastive fix is likely to work. Do not make the jury item the main reteach: 9/40 is the lowest score, but the item is ambiguous. A jury can take a singular verb when treated as one body and a plural verb when treated as individuals; if the test expected only one answer, it tested a convention, not a rule. Teach that distinction briefly, but do not drill it as a fixed law. Honest man is already at 31/40 and is an article-plus-sound rule; since 2019 is at 22/40 and can be fixed with a timeline. Neither is worth a whole period compared with the two agreement patterns.
2. Write a six-sentence contrastive drill that isolates the two priority patterns. Include the answers and a one-line rationale for each pair.
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Underline the true subject, then choose the verb.
- Neither the teacher nor the students ___ (was/were) present. Answer: were. Rationale: the nearer subject is students.
- Neither the students nor the teacher ___ (was/were) present. Answer: was. Rationale: the nearer subject is teacher.
- One of the boys ___ (was/were) late. Answer: was. Rationale: the head of the subject is one, not boys.
- The boys ___ (was/were) late. Answer: were. Rationale: boys is the plural head.
- The jury ___ (has/have) not reached a verdict. Answer: has or have. Rationale: singular if the jury acts as one body; plural if members act individually.
- The jury members ___ (has/have) not reached a verdict. Answer: have. Rationale: members is explicitly plural. The minimal pairs in 1–2 and 3–4 isolate the feature. Students should state the rule in their own words before writing the verb.
3. A student says, 'Neither/nor always takes a singular verb.' Correct the rule, give a counterexample, and state what the class should do in the exam.
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The absolute rule is unsafe. In standard English, neither...nor commonly follows the proximity principle: the verb agrees with the subject nearer to it. Counterexample: 'Neither the teacher nor the students were present' - students is nearer, so were. The singular form is also possible in formal usage, especially when both subjects are singular: 'Neither the teacher nor the principal was present.' The class should do three things in the exam: identify both subjects, underline the nearer one, and apply agreement to that noun; if the item is genuinely ambiguous, choose the form that matches the school's prescribed grammar and be consistent. The student's rule overcorrects because it turns a tendency into a law. The teacher should not simply say 'you are wrong'; the student should test the rule against the counterexample and rewrite it.