“let’s start at the very beginning…”

To find the verb in a sentence, change the tense (or time) of the sentence by saying “yesterday, every day, and tomorrow” at the beginning of the sentence. When you change the tense or the time, the verb will change automatically. Notice that every word in all three sentences is exactly the same, except for the verb! VERBS

YesterdaySteve ate pizza. (past tense) Every day Steve eats pizza. (present tense) Tomorrow Steve will eat pizza. (future tense)

Sometimes you may wonder how many words to mark for the verb. You already know that in future tense (tomorrow) the verb is two words. Sometimes the verb can even be three (or four!) words working together. How do you know how many words to mark? Mark the word that changes when you change the time. Then look right next to that word and see if there are any more words that seem to be working with the word you marked. Mark them too.

The good news is that for practical grammar, it really doesn’t matter if you mark every verb word. What matters is that you can tell if there is a verb in the sentence.

Anytime you analyze a sentence, always find the verb first. Then you can do the second step: find the subject by asking yourself, “who or what did the verb?” Brittany baked some fudge brownies. Tomorrow Brittany will bake some fudge brownies. Every day Brittany bakes some fudge brownies. SUBJECTS

The word that changed when I changed the tense was “baked”, so baked is the verb. Now, to find the subject ask yourself, “Who or what did the verb?” Say “who or what” and then say the verb and read the rest of the sentence to the end. Who or what baked some fudge brownies? The answer, of course, is Brittany. Mark the subject with a single underline. Brittany baked some fudge brownies.

In most of the sentences we write in English, the subject of the sentence comes before the verb. In some tricky sentences, the subject can come after the verb, but that doesn’t happen too often. So look in front of the verb to find the subject.

Sometimes a sentence can have more than one subject. Two people may be doing something together. This is called a COMPOUND SUBJECT. Katie and Jake swim at the YMCA. The verb is SWIM. To find the subject, ask yourself “Who swims at the YMCA?” Katie and Jake both swim. They are two subject sharing one verb, so underline both names, like this: Katie and Jake swim at the YMCA. COMPOUND SUBJECTS

Notice that I did not underline the word “AND”. “AND” is not a subject. Would you say “And swims at the YMCA”? No.

You might wonder how many words to underline for each subject. Sometimes you need to underline two or three words, but usually it’s best to underline only one word. Look at these examples: ONE WORD SUBJECTS

My brother is thirteen years old. Who or what is thirteen years old? MY BROTHER. Ok, that’s right, but if you want to underline only one word, which word would you choose? BROTHER is a better choice than MY, so just underline BROTHER. Jessica’s room is really messy. Who or what is really messy? JESSICA’S ROOM. Which one word would you choose? Is JESSICA really messy? (Maybe she is, but that’s not what the sentence is about.) Is the ROOM really messy? Yes. ROOM is the best choice.

A word may LOOK like a verb, but if it doesn’t change when we change the tense, it’s not doing the job of a verb in that sentence. Sometimesa word that looks like a verb can actually be the subject of a sentence. So, don’t get confused if the answer to your subject question: “Who or what did the verb?” happens to be a word that looks like a verb. STRANGE SUBJECTS

In grammar, it doesn’t matter what a word looks like. What matters is the JOB that it is doing in the sentence.