A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. This entry provides an overview of subject and verb agreement. Problems that pertain to specific nouns, such as data, number, and politics, are treated at these entries under Word Choice . 1 grammatical agreement . A verb must agree with its subject in person and number.
Singular subjects take singular verbs, and plural subjects take plural verbs.
We've all heard this lesson more times than we care to remember. It's a good lesson, to be sure, but it's not quite as simple as it sounds. 2 One of the nice things about English is that its verbs do not change much to agree with a subject in number. We say He goes, She tries, and It matters. All other persons require no changes to the verb.