Common grammatical mistake!

One of the mistake I tend to make whenever writing an essay is Subject-Verb Agreement (SVA) which is undoubtedly important to make reader feel smooth and interested in ideas presenting in an essay. Having referred to some kinds of books, I have drawn a correct grammatical usage of this structure as well as several effective exercises for anyone to master this grammar point. For SVA, we may not be confused when using simple tenses such as simple present, simple past and so forth. However, since the higher we learn, the more complicated and diverse grammatical structures we need to apply in our essay to attract readers, thus, mistakes are more likely to occur. The first note-worthy point is relevant to countable and uncountable nouns. Basically, after countable nouns in single form and uncountable nouns, we use singular verbs and conversely, after countable nouns in plural form, plural verbs are required. Another important point is “Each” and “Every”. As such, after these two words, we always use singular verbs. Take, for example, the sentence “Every man, woman and child in the world _____(need) love. We may note that there are three subjects in above sentence and some may fill in the blank with “need” yet this is not the correct answer since we have the word “Every” so that singular verb is the most appropriate solution, e.g “needs” . Another worth-mentioning special case is that when we have an sentence in the form of Subject(1), along with( together with , accompanied by ) Subject(2), then the verb in this sentence must agree with the Subject(1), not with Subject(2). Whereas, if we have a sentence in either of the forms : ‘Either Subject(1) or Subject(2)’ or ‘ Neither Subject(1) nor Subject(2)’, the verb must agree with the Subject(2). Last but not least, some nouns may end with “s” but they are not plural nouns including means, news, politics, mathematics, physics and so forth, thus, we have to use singular verb after these nouns. The rules above may appear trivial and familiar with you, but without regular practice, anyone can make even the most obvious mistakes. The content and example in this essay is quoted from the book UNDERSTANDING AND USING ENGLISH GRAMMAR (second edition) of Betty Schrampfer Azar .