Few people get excited at the thought of grammar. Often, it’s seen as a boring set of rules that isn’t relevant to everyday life.

Despite this, grammar is a vital part of written and verbal communication. It shapes how we use words. Most importantly, grammar determines how people process and react to those words.

Grammar is about your readers

There are strong reasons for paying attention to grammar in your writing.

Good grammar respects your readers and their time. It shows them that you’ve made an effort to write something they can understand quickly.

Poor grammar is jarring and likely to distract readers. This makes it harder for them to focus on your meaning. There’s a risk some readers will disengage, believing you lack credibility or aren’t interested in meeting their needs.

Many writers aren’t familiar with grammar rules – through no fault of their own. The Style Manual covers the basics so you can avoid common pitfalls. Here are 2 areas of grammar with pitfalls that can be difficult to avoid in your writing. The writing feels wrong, but it’s hard to say why.

Sentences

Sentences are the building blocks of writing. How you structure them has a big effect on how easy your writing is to understand.

Typically, sentences contain a subject, a verb and an object. A complete sentence can stand alone and retain its meaning – it has a central idea.

An incomplete sentence feels wrong to a reader and is a distracting irritant. For example, ‘Before I go’, ‘Behind the tree’ and ‘Where you walk’ are not complete sentences. They leave you looking for the rest of the idea.

Simple sentences contain one idea. Complex sentences have one idea and extra information that contributes to that idea.

Long rambling sentences are easy to get lost in. By the time your reader gets to the end, they’ve forgotten the beginning. Where possible, keep your sentences to 25 words or fewer. Shorter sentences lighten the reader’s cognitive load.

Subject–verb agreement

In English, the form of a verb changes according to whether the subject is singular or plural. This rule is called ‘subject–verb agreement’: the form of the verb must agree with the form of the subject.

For example:

• The dog runs around the yard.
• The dogs run around the yard.

Native English speakers do this change automatically, but many other languages don’t work like this.

The rule is less obvious when the subject of the sentence is a collective noun. A collective noun is a word that describes a group of things as if they were one thing. Examples include ‘team’, ‘crowd’ and ‘taskforce’. Collective nouns are singular, so they are followed by the singular form of the verb.

This is easy to do for some collective nouns: The pack (of dogs) runs around the yard. But it’s harder to do for others.

Tricky subjects

The nouns ‘staff’, ‘committee’ and ‘department’ are staples of APS writing and they can be tricky.

‘Staff’, ‘committee’ and ‘department’ are nearly always collective nouns in government writing. This means you will use a singular verb.

But occasionally, ‘committee’ and ‘staff’ do use a plural verb. This happens when the individual parts of these nouns (e.g. the people) operate independently. The individual parts are implied in the sentence, rather than written.

It is rare for ‘department’ to use a plural verb. Treat it as a collective noun unless you’re sure it isn’t.

Definitions

In a typical sentence, the subject is the person or thing that does the action.

A verb describes an action, an event, a change or a state.

Objects can be ‘direct’ or ‘indirect’. Direct objects receive the action of a verb and usually appear immediately after it: ‘She trains dogs.’ Indirect objects usually follow a preposition: ‘She trains dogs for them.’

Prepositions include: ‘in’, ‘by’, ‘between’, ‘to’, ‘from’ and ‘for’.

Style Manual pages

• Parts of sentences
• Sentences
• Transitive and intransitive verbs (blog)
• Types of words (section)