If a student is going to be productive and achieve good grades, however, they should attend class often and submit their homework promptly. Notice how the main topic of the paragraph above is singular (it’s singular because it’s the first paragraph); next, it becomes plural (it’s plural because it’s the second paragraph); and finally, it becomes plural and singular again.
If you do this type of writing frequently, you’ll notice that you tend to repeat sentences or paragraphs quite often. And then you start to get confused. If you don’t understand something written in a sentence, you can usually just read it once before you have to re-read it. But if you read a whole paragraph or even a complete sentence and then you don’t understand what it’s saying, you’re in a bit of trouble. It can also make your sentence sounds unnatural.
The pronoun agreement mistake is so common that many writers just avoid it. But what you need to realize is that it’s very difficult to correct this mistake unless you know all about grammar and spelling.
As you read over your essay and try to find the problem, it’s important that you don’t just ignore this mistake. Most of the time, the mistake will be in one of your pronouns. For example, if you write “She needs to finish her homework” and then, later on in the paragraph, you write “I’ll give her a call,” you may have made a simple error in your sentence construction.
In this case, you’re using two words in a word order that’s out of order. This can also cause problems if you use a third person. and possessive pronoun. Here’s one common pronoun agreement mistake: “I’ll have an interview with the CEO of XYZ Company” (or whatever company you’re referencing) at the beginning of the paragraph. You might have written “I’ll have an interview” instead of “have”I’ll have” instead of “has” at the end.
The word order that you use will change the meaning of your writing. If you were referring to the CEO of XYZ Company in the middle of the paragraph, you would write, “I will have an interview with XYZ Company’s CEO.”
Once you figure out the mistake, you can usually correct it by checking the word order in the sentence. If you have any doubt, reword it a couple times until it sounds correct. This is a very easy error to correct, but it’s worth the time to make sure your writing is correct.
pronoun agreement mistake also happens when you use two different nouns in the same sentence. For example, “The president of the XYZ Company gave his secretary a pink slip.” “President”Secretary” is two different nouns, but the use of them together in the same sentence makes your sentence sound unnatural.
To fix this wrong use of the word “said,” you can say, “The president told his secretary to say something.” Instead of “said”his secretary,” you could simply write “said something.” This makes a very minor error, but you’d still want to check your sentence’s grammar first. and make sure you didn’t make a bigger mistake before making your sentence.
If you have two words next to each other in the sentence, you should always use “said” and not “said in front of the noun. In other words, instead of writing “She said, ‘You have to learn everything about XYZ Company,’ you could have written ‘She said, ‘You have to know everything about XYZ Company.’ And then when you’ve learned everything about XYZ Company, you have to know everything about XYZ Company’.”
You don’t have to worry about writing good sentences if you don’t know how to use proper grammar and spelling, but when you’re writing for a class, a professor, or for a job, you can use a writing software to check your writing. That will save you time and keep your essay looking professional. Even though it may seem like a waste of time, you can improve your writing skills by using this technique.
