Agreement assessment is a crucial component of good writing. It ensures that subjects and verbs agree in number, pronouns agree in gender and number, and parallel structures are used for lists and comparisons. Proper agreement makes a sentence clear and easy to read, while incorrect agreement can lead to confusion and misunderstanding.
When assessing agreement, it is important to first identify the subject of the sentence. The subject is the person, place, thing, or idea that the sentence is about. The verb in the sentence must agree with the subject in number, meaning that singular subjects take singular verbs and plural subjects take plural verbs.
For example, in the sentence “The dog runs in the park,” the subject is “dog,” which is singular, so the verb “runs” is also in the singular form. Conversely, in the sentence “The dogs run in the park,” the subject is “dogs,” which is plural, so the verb “run” is also in the plural form.
Pronoun agreement is also important in writing. Pronouns must agree in gender and number with the nouns they refer to. For example, if the subject of the sentence is a singular female, the pronoun used to refer to her must also be singular and female, such as “she” or “her.”
In addition to subject-verb and pronoun agreement, parallelism is important for consistency and clarity in writing. Parallel structure means that items in a list, comparison, or series are grammatically similar, using the same parts of speech or verb tense. For example, “I like hiking, swimming, and biking” uses parallel structure because each verb (hiking, swimming, biking) ends in “-ing.”
In conclusion, agreement assessment is a key tool for producing clear and effective writing. By ensuring proper subject-verb and pronoun agreement, as well as using parallel structure, writers can convey their ideas in a way that is both easy to understand and engaging to read.