Editing: SV AGR

One of the bigger grammatical issues to edit out draft to draft is subject-verb agreement (S/V AGR), which means that the subject and its verb have to match in number (singular or plural) and person (first, second, third).

Identify, then Fix

1. Underline the subject


• If the subject is a noun phrase, reduce the subject down to its proper pronoun so that you can better match it with the verb.


• The amazingly bright Johnny = He
• Johnny and Tom=They
• The sisters and I=We
• My favorite lamp=It


2. Circle the verb(s) that the subject 'acts on'


3. Ignore every other word in sentence to test for agreement! 

• Use chart on 198 for a visual aid/reminder (all regular, or typical, verbs will follow the top chart)

• Pay attention to sentences with multiple subjects 


• 'and'= plural
• 'nor' or "'or'=verb must agree with the subject closest it (200)
• Collective nouns (where a group of people is referred to as one unit) such as jury, committee, crowd, and class are to be singular forms unless the idea in the sentence shows the individuals acting separately (see 201-202)
• indefinite pronouns are treated as singular (200)
• Who, which and that=agree with the antecedent 
• antecedent sounds like 'ancestor,' and it means: the noun or pronoun that came before which the current one is supposed to refer to...
• A title of a work or company needs a singular verb, even if it sounds plural!  (The Chicago Bears is my favorite team.)
• Treat gerund phrases (when -ing verbs are used at start) as singular nouns (Beginning with today...)
• ...and other special cases

Editing  Strategies for Your Essays

• Read your paragraphs backwards or with a sheet that covers the other sentences to slow you down

• Do your editing on a printed copy first, so that you can better diagram

• Diagram each sentence for its subject (underline) and verb (circle). 

• Convert the subject to its pronoun form (
• Or, cross out (on the page or in your head) all the words but the basic subject 

• Read for agreement between pronoun and verb to test the verb's correctness

• Make sure to then write the corrections above where you find a lack of agreement. Consult your Rules for Writers for extra help where unsure. 

• If editing on the computer:

• Re-type your essay from a blank document
• REALLY DO THIS WITH at least one Major Error editing session, for the action is another way to slow down and reflect on what you wrote:

• Run-ons (both fused and comma splice) editing session
• Fragment editing session
• Comma editing session
• Verb Tense shift editing session

Using and Citing Poetry in an Essay

• The ideas about any quoting of outside sources are still relevant with poetry. You still need to lead-in to your quotes, attaching them to your own ideas with a sentence. Never drop a quote! 

• Use the line number in your in-text ( ) citation, rather than page. The line of a poem never changes! 

• Don't quote more than three lines of poetry at a time, within a sentence. Your points will be harder to understand because there will be way too much language to unpack in those lines. Plus, quoting too much takes up your thought space. 

• With "If--" you are lucky that Kipling provides clear ideas with couplets, so you will like cite couplets.

• You don't have to, nor should you want to, always quote entire lines. With poems, you can practice quoting just important images or a figures of speech within a line or lines.

• Example:  The speaker's first piece of advice includes the idiom to "keep your head" (line 1). The idiom refers to the listeners need to stay calm and focused.

• Example: A major theme of the poem includes self control, as seen in the speaker's advice to the son to "trust yourself" (3), "don't give way to hating" (7), and do not "make dreams your master" (9). Such advice continues for the rest of the poem, including in the final stanza, where the speaker reminds his son not to let neither "foes nor loving friends" (27) emotionally change the way he acts. 

• Mechanically, if you are integrating two lines of poetry into your own sentence, you need to indicate the line break with a forward slash:   .../ ...

• Example:  "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock" beings with the command, "Let us go now, you and I, / When the clouds are spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherized upon a table," with that image setting the poem's sombre tone (lines 1-3).

• If the first word of each line is capitalized, make sure you do so in your own quote. Here, all three lines begin with words capitalized: Let, When, Like.  Your Kipling poem will do the same! 

• If you are quoting the last line of one stanza and the first line of the next stanza in the same quote, you use a double forward slash: ...// ...

• Example: Look at the poem "Those Winter Sundays." 

• The son shows the tense childhood relationship with his father, "and slowly I would rise and dress,/ fearing the chronic angers of that house,// Speaking indifferently to him" (lines 8-10).

The Portfolio

For Thursday, 11/20, you want to have your Portfolio ready: 

• You need two Portfolio folders, which you can buy at the MC bookstore. 

• In each Portfolio folder: identical copies of your best two revised essays, as polished as you can get them.

• From: Essay 1, 2, 3 or Midterm (two copies of best two)
• CLEAN COPIES, meaning no writing on them

• Your in-class final will also be placed in each folder, so make sure you really study for that final essay.

• You want to make sure you finish the essay, or nearly finished when time is called.
• You want to make sure you edit the essay.
• You want to make sure you demonstrate a solid thesis statement, topic sentences, use of signal phrases, and a well-laid out introduction

Poetic Sound

• Rhythm and/or meter are huge factors. If writing in a form, syllables and stress of syllables becomes important. If writing free verse, sounds become even more important. “Sounds play in the same ballpark, on the same team.”

• Meter –pattern of stress(short)/unstress (long) syllables. Stressed syllables=accentuation 
• Syllabic verse – each line having a certain # of syllables
• Alliteration – repetition of sound in first syllable of words (Sufferin’ succotash!)
• Assonance – internal vowel sound repeated
• Consonance – internal consonant sound repeated… (The batters teeth chatter… / the pitcher switches)
• Anaphora – repetition of word/phrase at beginning of lines (Today, … / Today, … / Today, …)
• Epiphora – repetition of the last word/phrase of lines 

• The Rudy Giuliani Game
• Clowns cry on 9/11
• Firefighters burn on 9/11
• Flags fly after 9/11

Editing Mechanics: Go through the list with Rules for Writers

Use the list below to edit different issues that arise in your drafts. You want to format and present your Portfolio essays nicely, with none of these easily fixable (VERY EASY) edits. Go through them individually in each of your essays.


1. Don't use "etc." and other Latin abbreviations (343) because they are tonally too casual.

2. Acronyms: only used widely-known acronyms. As RR notes, if you are using a less unfamiliar acronym you need to introduce the whole title first, with the acronym in parentheses.

• Bourdain studied at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA), the premier cooking school in the USA.  [See what I did there?!?}

3. Salutations can be used with proper names, when logical. 

• Unless the character goes by "Miss Sophie," you would call her Sophie--never Ms. Sophie.  However, Mrs. Rasmussen is also Anna Rasmussen--never Missus Rasmussen.

4. With numbers, the general rule is to spell out all numbers one-hundred and below. Along with rule four, you also have rule five dealing with numbers:

5. If a number starts off a sentence, write out that number. Fourteen-hundred and seventy-five is a large number, isn't it?

6. Stay numerically consistent. If you make the minor error of stating 3 out of four dentists agree, you should really be arguing that 3 out of 4 dentists agree. 

7.  As the book notes, numbers used as part of modifying phrases can be in number form, not spelled out.

• He hired an editor to get the 500-pound monkey off his back. The editor, though, was not five-hundred pounds, nor a monkey.

8. To italicize, or not to italicize, that is A question. However, you should never have to make it THE question.

•  Longer, "complete" texts such as books, albums, TV shows, movies, plays, magazines, newspapers, and even websites should be italicized. 

• However, the Bible and the Constitution are not italicized (348). Legal document titles are never italicized. 

9. Also, do not italicize (or bold, or underline) the title of your own essay. Use capitalization rules, instead.

10. Go beyond spellcheck. Use spellcheck, but don't rely on it. Spellcheck doesn't catch homonyms (there, their, there're | it it's | to two too | here hear!)

11.  Plurals versus (not verses) Possessives.  The apostrophe (') is used for ownership. You cannot tack on an -s or -es to a word to make that word own the next word. 

• What do I do with Jerry's throw [rug]? Do all Jerrys throw left-handed?

12. Capitalize proper nouns, like character names. Real people names. Business names. Titles of sources.

• There is a difference between giving Johnny cash and giving Johnny Cash away.

13. Commonly misspelled words: look for them versus assuming you have tight verses. Check 356-57 in RR, but also go to a dictionary for words you are unsure of.

14. Hyphens are not dashes. Hyphens are used with compound words, between prefixes and suffixes (360). 

15. Hyphens are also important to use when you are formatting your essay. If there is too much white space at the end of a line and you have long word, try to split that word up at a natural syllabic break to avoid the empty, or too short, line.

HW for Tuesday

1. Bring in CLEAN, REVISED AND EDITED Essays 1, 2 and Midterm. If you come to class having done nothing but what we have worked on in class, with essays that have your professor's critique all over it, then you are setting yourself up for failing the class.

Your job over this weekend is to re-write and edit those essays that you feel will help you get out of Developmental English and into credit level courses. Coming to class with essays that you have not touched, looked at, or thought much about just indicates something about where you are at in "getting it."

I have given you multiple activities and ideas for how to work on your language. The hard part is yours to work out: putting in the difficult thinking and working on your essay's language, because you must realize that what you have done so far is simply not good enough to pass a credit-level class.


Work on a few of these things, separately, daily, between now and Tuesday:

1. Adding context to your introductions. Giving proper background information and details. Who is your audience, what do they need to know about your subject? What is the purpose of the essay, and what points am I making to support and prove that purpose?

2. Edit run ons

3. Edit comma errors

4. Edit your sentences for concision

5. Edit fragments

6. Edit mechanics

7. Edit agreement issues: subject verb, tense, point of view

8. Content revision/addition: Work on adding details and descriptions to examples

9. Work on Emphasizing Key Ideas with coordination and subordination

10. Edit concision of sentences.

11. Get a dictionary out, a thesaurus, and build up your individual essay word banks. Work on going through essays, identifying repeated words and phrases, and work on new forms of expressions--synonyms!

Revising Essays To Emphasize Key Ideas

Open up the hood to your essays and look at the language engine. How strong are your main ideas, how much coordination and subordination and paralleling and ordering have you taken to your main points? No matter. Even if you have spent a lot of time on those ideas, you can spend a bit more time going through your essays and looking for places to reorder and rewrite sentences to make sure your ideas are EMPHASIZED.

1. Do one of two strategies for your already revised essays:

• Bold all of your most important sentences, the thesis claim and topic sentences. 

• OR, sketch outline those same sentences on a clean sheet of paper, with space in between each sentence so that you can work on writing the sentence over using different techniques.

2. Look at concision once again, after revising the sentences. Again, the biggest thing that different strategies do is making us continuously inspect our language and try to better what we've already written--in content and in grammar.