The two ironclad rules of English Grammar

English is a crazy language, as notorious for its numerous exceptions as it is for any systematic rules. However, as a result of teaching English and English Grammar over the years, I have distilled two ironclad rules of English Grammar that are ALWAYS true.

1) Every sentence MUST have at least a subject and a verb. A sentence need not have an object unless the verb is transitive (requiring an object), but it must have a subject and verb.

So, for example, "He walked." is a complete sentence, where the subject is "He" and the verb is "walked" (simple past).

Even a one-word sentence like "Stop!" for example, has a subject, even though it is not seen. In this case (called the "Imperative" in grammar), the subject of the sentence is "You" and is said to be understood (not requiring being said or written). In other words, that sentence is really "(You) stop!" where "You" is the subject and "stop" is the verb.

2) Subject and verb MUST always agree in number (singular or plural) and person (I, You, He\She\It).

This means that a singular subject ALWAYS takes a singular verb and a plural subject ALWAYS takes a plural verb. Equally, a first-person subject ("I" or "We") always takes the first-person form of the verb.

For example, "I am a student" and "They are students."

In the first sentence, "I" is a first-person singular subject and ALWAYS takes the first-person singular form of the verb "to be" In other words, you NEVER say "I is a student" or "I are a student" because those two sentences mis-match the singular subject "I" with the third-person singular "is" or with the plural form of "to be" ("Are" is also the second-person singular.)

In the second sentence, "They" is a third-person plural subject and ALWAYS takes the third-person plural form of the veb "to be" In other words, you NEVER say "They am a student" or "They is a student" because those two sentences mis-match the third-person plural subject "They" with the first-person ("I") singular verb "am" or the third-person ("He\She\It") singular verb "is".

One final note: this discussion is based on standard English and deliberately ignores dialectal variants (like English spoken among some whites in the American south or the English spoken by some African Americans).

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