Completion

One of the commonest errors at any level of writing is to leave out a necessary bit of a sentence. Sometimes writers miss out an important idea because it is so obvious to them – but the reader has no idea what is being said. (Sometimes, this can be a word like ‘not’, whose absence changes the meaning of a sentence totally!) Good proofreading should catch these errors.

It is less obvious sometimes to students – though it often attracts the Tutor’s attention – when one of the essential building blocks of grammar is left out. The most essential of all are the subject and the verb.

The verb is – you may have been taught when younger – a ‘doing word’. More accurately, it is a word that can change its ending to match its tense (e.g. he does and it is are the present tense; he did and it was are the past tense), or, in the present tense, its number (whether it is singular or plural: does she, or do they?)

The subject of a Sentence, in Grammar, is not the same as the logical topic. Grammatically speaking, the Subject of a sentence is the ‘person’ who is performing the action of the verb – who is ‘doing’ the ‘doing word’. In the following examples, the Subjects are in bold: Wellington won the battle of Waterloo; Scotland won the World Cup (I wish!); It is raining; There is something for you. (The last two are examples of dummy subjects: although they are essential grammatically, they do not actually mean anything.)