What's wrong with these sentences? 

1. Boston won their third straight game today.

2. And I'm gonna miss you, like a child misses their blanket ...

3. The couple is hoping they can adopt a child.

4. The family invested all their money in stocks.

 

If you didn't spot any errors, don't feel bad (see below for answers)! These are all incredibly common errors in writing ... the kind of bad writing I vow to destroy! The errors come in what we call noun/verb agreements. In this case, the pronouns and possessives also apply.

What am I talking about? It's a simple case of the nouns/subjects having to match the verbs, pronouns and possessives in conjugation and understanding. 

If you've studied a foreign language, this should be easier to understand. But even if you haven't, whether you realize it or not you are familiar with and follow these rules (well, MOST of the time!) every time you speak or write. And you probably notice it right away when those basic rules are violated. Especially when someone whose first language isn't English makes such a mistake.

Prime example: We is having a great time.

If you've conjugated verbs while studying a foreign language, you recognize that the subject here, "We", is first person plural of the verb to be. So the verb that follows must be "are," not "is." As in We are having a great time.

 

In other words, a singular noun/subject must be followed by the singular conjugation of the verb and singular pronouns/possessives. And a plural noun/subject must be followed, of course, by plural conjugations of the verb and plural pronouns/possessives.

So let's return to those four sentences from the top and demonstrate why they are wrong!

 1. Boston won their third straight game today.

Why is it wrong? The subject is "Boston," which is a singular subject. It's one city, singular. Simple, right? You would say Boston is (singular) a city, not Boston are (plural) a city, right?

Well, since the subject is singular, the possessive must be singular as well. Boston won its third straight game today.

If that corrected sentence sounds funny or even wrong, refer to my earlier blogs, which point out the sin of what I haved dubbed Parrot's Disease.  

Don't be a parrot, simply repeating what you see or hear, because it's often WRONG! Many words sound wrong only because we are used to HEARING them used wrongly! Be a better writer/speaker and ensure that it's right, not just that it's common. 

2. And I'm gonna miss you, like a child misses their blanket ...

Taken straight from Fergie's hit song "Big Girls Don't Cry." The noun/subject is "child," which is singular and correctly has the singular conjugation "misses" afterward. But then the possessive, "their," wrongly is plural. It should be  ... a child misses his (or her) blanket.

3. The couple is hoping they can adopt a child.

This one gets tricky because in English "couple" can take a singular OR plural verb, depending on the usage. But this sentence tries to do BOTH! Your best bet, unless an editor insists you do otherwise, is to make it simple and ALWAYS treat couple as plural. The couple are going to the mall, the couple are getting a divorce, etc.

But here the writer chooses to use couple as a singular noun, which is fine. What's NOT fine is then using the plural pronoun "they" to identify the subject, which we just saw was singular. Correct versions of this sentence are as follows:
The couple are hoping they can adopt a child.
The couple is hoping it can adopt a child.

Do you see? Singular noun = singular verb = singular pronoun/possessives

4. The family invested all their money in stocks.

This incredibly common error finds its way into far too many stories and even page 1 headlines! A reporter who simply didn't understand insisted such a construction is correct, that a "family" can't be an "it." He was in Stage 4 (terminal condition) of Parrot's Disease! He went entirely by what he was used to hearing, not what simple rules of grammar dictate.

And the rules here, as in the other three cases, are simple: The noun/subject is "family," which is singular (The family is, not the family are). So any possessive that refers back to the subject must be singular as well. So it should be: 
The family invested all its money in stocks.

This all might sound boring and obvious, but you'd be amazed how often writers and editors fail to get such things right. Downright amazed ...

I hope these examples make it clear to you the need to make sure your nouns, verbs and pronouns/possessives always agree. I could cite lots of other example, but it's time to wrap this up. 

My next post will be on superfluous words (the many words we automatically add to stories/letters that actually add nothing at all and can even mislead). Stay tuned ...