SAT Reasoning

Sub Topics

Identifying Subject Verb Agreement Errors Identifying Errors in Agreement For Nouns Pronouns How to Identify Errors in Adjectives Adverbs And Nouns Agreement Sentence Agreement Avoiding Faulty Collective Ownership How to Identify Errors in Comparison Correlation Parallelism

Main Topics

Lessons and MCQs

Select Test Select Question Types

SAT Reasoning: Identifying Errors in Sentence Structure
Identifying Errors in Agreement For Nouns Pronouns

Agreement is much more than sharing same opinion. This lecture would make you capable in dealing with agreements.

Identifying Errors in Agreement For Nouns Pronouns

Agreement

Same Language is all the thing that help you to communicate with the people of all the races. Imagine if varies with person to person would you even be capable of communication. Definitely not so much. So, our language has provided with lots of rules that make the communication easy.

Agreement is one aspect it. Grammatically, agreement allude to words that change structure according to other words in the sentence. And a fluent or natural speaker of it could ultimately identify the mistake of it.

Pronoun Agreement

The nouns and pronouns agreement would be focused here. Where,

A pronoun is a replacing word and used instead of noun, and
An antecedent is the noun that is replaced.

All pronouns must agree with their antecedents or predecessor.

Let’s work on these examples,

'The boy was painting a picture.'

'He destroyed it with his hands.'

The second sentence is flooded with pronouns.

What we have replaced here?

'He' replaced 'boy,' and 'it' replaced 'painting.' Thus, 'boy' and ' painting ' are antecedents for the pronouns 'He' and 'it.'

In addition, 'his' is another pronoun that also refers to the boy. So, the two pronouns 'He' and 'his' both have the antecedent 'boy.'

Without pronouns, these sentences would read:

'The boy was painting a picture.'

'The destroyed painting with boy’s hands.'

Following are three ways in which pronouns must agree:

Gender
Number
Case

Let's discuss each.

Gender

Initially, in gender pronouns and antecedents agreement is necessary. If pronoun is for male it couldn’t be used for female.

Let’s have an example,

'The boy was painting a picture.', 'She destroyed it with her hands.' Is it suitable? Definitely No!

The second sentence used the female pronouns 'she' and 'her' to refer to the boy. This is an evident mistake in gender agreement.

Number

Then, in number pronouns and antecedents agreement is also necessary. Certain pronouns are used to replace singular and plural antecedents. For example;

'The boy breaks his glass.'

Here the pronoun is,

'His' is a pronoun replacing the word 'boy.' As the boy is singular and male, so we use the singular pronoun 'his.'

In case of plural:

'The boys break their glass.' So, the pronoun is changed accordingly.

Case

Finally, in case pronouns and antecedents agreement is also essential. So what actually the ‘case’ is? It refers to the position of the word that is used within the sentence.

Following are three positions for pronouns:

Subject
Object
Possessive

Subject case:

Pronoun is called subject if it is in pronoun case. It consists of 'he,' 'she,' 'I,' 'you,' 'we,' 'they,' and 'it.'

In this sentence, 'He destroyed it with his hands.' 'He' is in the subject case. You are not allowed to use a pronoun that is not a subject pronoun in the subject position.

For instance, in the sentence 'She destroyed it with his hands.'

You have seen that the sentence isn’t right. So, a subject pronoun is needed to work as the subject of the sentence.

Following two can occur other than the subject position in sentence: