Participants, processes and circumstances – 191
to check back over it just to make sure you haven’t made slips with
singulars and plurals.
It is easy to make a mistake when the referring nominal is
separated from the verb by lots of other words:
The relations between line, form, space, tone and colour to be found in a
picture is very complex.
Secondly, take especial care if your singular nominal is of the kind
which refers not to one specific individual but to any member of that
class of individuals – the so-called ‘generic’ reference. In the sentence
below ‘The social worker’ refers generically to any social worker and
all social workers, not to a single identified individual. The writer of
this sentence has therefore had this in mind rather than the needs of
number agreement:
The social worker do not compromise their own standards and values to
suit any occasion.
It is likely that the desire to avoid language which specifies the sex of
the social worker is also implicated in the error here, as you will see
from the ‘their’. ‘Their’ cannot be substituted for ‘his’ or ‘her’ without
your checking back through the sentence to ensure that everything
agrees.
Thirdly, if a singular referring nominal is followed immediately by an ‘of’ phrase with plural nominals, it is easy to be distracted
by these plurals when you come to assign number to the verb. This
is probably because the plurals are most immediately in one’s mind:
The frequency of exercises in the old composition manuals suggest that
number agreement can be a problem for many writers.
It is not the exercises that suggest, but their frequency that suggests.
to check back over it just to make sure you haven’t made slips with
singulars and plurals.
It is easy to make a mistake when the referring nominal is
separated from the verb by lots of other words:
The relations between line, form, space, tone and colour to be found in a
picture is very complex.
Secondly, take especial care if your singular nominal is of the kind
which refers not to one specific individual but to any member of that
class of individuals – the so-called ‘generic’ reference. In the sentence
below ‘The social worker’ refers generically to any social worker and
all social workers, not to a single identified individual. The writer of
this sentence has therefore had this in mind rather than the needs of
number agreement:
The social worker do not compromise their own standards and values to
suit any occasion.
It is likely that the desire to avoid language which specifies the sex of
the social worker is also implicated in the error here, as you will see
from the ‘their’. ‘Their’ cannot be substituted for ‘his’ or ‘her’ without
your checking back through the sentence to ensure that everything
agrees.
Thirdly, if a singular referring nominal is followed immediately by an ‘of’ phrase with plural nominals, it is easy to be distracted
by these plurals when you come to assign number to the verb. This
is probably because the plurals are most immediately in one’s mind:
The frequency of exercises in the old composition manuals suggest that
number agreement can be a problem for many writers.
It is not the exercises that suggest, but their frequency that suggests.