The Writing Center at Methodist University

Imagine this: you and your significant other are at a campus event. You can’t help but notice another person making eyes at your sweetie. In fact, you find that you are pretty upset because this person is threatening the agreement between the two of you. That agreement is, obviously, that you are a couple. A similar situation can happen in sentences when considering subject-verb agreement. In the classic Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, 4 th ed ., subject-verb agreement is described as the following: “The number of the subject determines the number of the verb” (9). Yep. Words have to agree. Agreement is paramount. When writing in English, the only numbers a writer needs to concern herself with are one—a.k.a. singular—and more than one—a.k.a. more than one. It’s pure symmetry. However, when phrases interrupt that symmetry, a Pandora’s Box of confusion springs open. The subject and verb agree in the following sentence: Corey loves beating Michel at Call of Du...

Last month, I threw a party. My friend Jen agreed to help me prepare for this event, and two days before the party, she texted me this: “Can I bring Josh, a DJ and a clown?” I had planned to provide the party’s music, but I was thrilled Jen had found someone who would do the job for free, especially since this person would DJ in costume. The days before the party moved slowly, for I could not wait to meet Josh the DJ-ing clown. The night of the party arrived and so did Jen, Josh, a DJ, and a clown, who was just a man named Rick getting off work from a kid’s birthday party. I lay in bed that night thinking how the entire night’s events went wrong all because of one missing punctuation mark: the Oxford comma. I asked Jen, who is British, if she could begin using the Oxford comma—aka the serial comma—for clarity’s sake, but she refused vehemently. She hates the Oxford comma, she retorted, and would rather die than ever use it. I responded with just as much passion that the Oxford com...

Ever wonder why we can't just write the way we talk? Wouldn’t it be so much easier if we could? For most of us, however, writing the way we talk isn’t a great idea. Just listen to Boomhower from King of the Hill as he calls 911.  Can you imagine an academic paper written Boomhower style? No. Definitely not. This may be unwelcome news, but readers do have expectations of writers, and those expectations change from setting to setting. For example, if we read a creative piece—say The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain—we likely would have more patience with the material than if we read a news article in a periodical (magazine or newspaper) or a professional web page. Readers’ expectations change according to the setting. You might have a group of readers who watch Family Guy or read comic books, and those readers would still expect a more formal writing style if they read your college paper.  The sentences need to be clear, first of all. ...