When doing the text editing or writing an essay, I will encounter lots of grammar problems, such as Pronouns, Article, Verbs, Prepositions, Phrases and Sentences. Among those problems how to use verbs accurately is one of the most difficult problems to me. The tense of verbs is one common problem. As verbs are the words used to indicate the tense of a sentence, a verb has different tense forms: present, present participle, past and past participle. Many Verbs acquire the inflection -ed when they are in the past and past participle forms. However, there are verbs that do not adhere to this regularity. They are called irregular verbs. There are some examples: arise-arose-arising-arisen, bid-bade-bidding-bidden, draw-drew-drawing-drawn, hit-hit-hitting-hit. We should pay attention to these verbs or we will make mistakes. Another problem is the Subject-verb Agreement. What we need to pay attention is some trick collective nouns, like committee, company and society. They can be used as singular or plural nouns because they are singular, but logically, they are plural entities. Here is one example:
The committee has decided to go ahead with the merger.
The committee have decided to go ahead with the merger.
However, when the subject is one of …, which is singular, we should use the singular verb form.
3 条评论:
hey yi ping....i agree with you that sometimes it might be quite confusing when using irregular verbs ...since not all verb acquire the inflation -ed for the past and past participle tense.Mayb u can add some exercise to that...i think you have forgotten to insert some. It might be helpful for us, in order to clarify the problems you are facing.
For the collective noun,it really caught my attention that i should beware some of these tricky grammar. In fact, i went on to do a further research on it and i found it quite interesting. Let me give you some exmaples...
A handful of nouns appear to be plural in form but take a singular verb:
* The news is bad.
* Gymnastics is fun to watch
(http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/GRAMMAR/plurals.htm#problems)
and
The names of companies and other organizations are usually regarded as singular, regardless of their ending:
"General Motors has announced its fall lineup of new vehicles."
Try to avoid the inconsistency that is almost inevitable when you think of corporate entities as a group of individuals
I thought this might be more helpful....Thanz for mentioning some of the mistakes which we have often neglect it.
Hi, yiping. You wrote about two important mistakes which most of us usually make. The tense of verb is a common mistake which we usually make when writing or speaking. In the verb tense part, I think you may forget to mention furture tense. It is also an important part, because there are some differrent ways to express future tense. In the second part, you just mention something about Subject-verb agreement. It is better to provide more details. How do you think?
Well, I think the articles would be more interesting if you list down all the principles of your grammar mistakes. For example, you can include the future tense. It would be better if you explain how to use each of the tenses correctly. If there are exercise then it will be perfect.
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