Grammar & correct usage

Grammar items on the LET are almost never about naming a rule. They ask you to pick the correct or the erroneous sentence. Train your ear on the patterns below; the exam recycles the same traps.

Subject-verb agreement

The verb agrees with its subject, not with the nearest noun.

• Ignore words between subject and verb. The box of chocolates is on the table. (subject = box, not chocolates)
• Compound subjects joined by and take a plural verb: Tom and Jerry are here.
• With or / nor / either…or / neither…nor, the verb agrees with the nearer subject: Neither the teacher nor the students were late. Neither the students nor the teacher was late.
• Indefinite pronouns each, everyone, everybody, either, neither, one, nobody, anybody are singular: Each of the pupils has a book. Everybody is ready.
• There / Here + verb agrees with the real subject that follows: There are many reasons.
• Collective nouns (class, team, family, jury) take a singular verb when acting as one unit: The team is winning.
• Amounts of money, time, and distance treated as one lump are singular: Five hundred pesos is enough. Ten years is a long time.
• A title or a singular noun ending in -s stays singular: Mathematics is hard. The news is good.

Tenses

Match the tense to the time and keep it consistent within a sentence.

Tense	Use	Example
Simple present	habitual / general truth	The sun rises in the east.
Present perfect	past action linked to now	She has taught here since 2010.
Simple past	finished action, stated time	He arrived yesterday.
Past perfect	the earlier of two past actions	The bell had rung before we came.
Future	action to come	They will submit it tomorrow.

Traps:

• Use present perfect with since / for / already / yet; use simple past with a finished time word (yesterday, in 2019, last week). Wrong: I have seen him yesterday.
• Past perfect marks which past event came first: After she had left, we called.
• Do not shift tense needlessly: He came in and sat down (not sits).

Pronoun case

• Subjective (I, he, she, we, they, who) for subjects; objective (me, him, her, us, them, whom) for objects of verbs and prepositions.
• Drop the other person to test: between you and me (not I); He gave it to Ana and me.
• After than / as in comparisons, supply the missing verb: She is taller than I (am).
• Pronoun after the verb to be is subjective in formal usage: It was he who called.
• Who = subject, whom = object: the man who called vs the man whom I called.
• A pronoun must agree with its antecedent: Every student must bring his or her ID (singular antecedent).

Modifiers

• Put the modifier next to the word it describes. Misplaced: She almost drove her kids to school every day. → She drove her kids to school almost every day.
• A dangling modifier has no logical subject to attach to. Wrong: Walking to school, the rain fell. Right: Walking to school, I felt the rain. The word right after the opening phrase must be the one doing the action.
• Only goes directly before what it limits: He ate only the rice vs Only he ate the rice.

Parallelism

Items in a series or joined by and / or and by correlatives (both…and, not only…but also, either…or) must share the same grammatical form.

• Not parallel: She likes swimming, hiking, and to read. → …swimming, hiking, and reading.
• Not parallel: He is not only smart but also works hard. → He is not only smart but also hardworking.
• Keep the pattern after correlatives: whatever form follows the first word must follow the second.

Most-tested usage traps

• Fewer (count nouns) vs less (mass): fewer books, less water.
• Between (two) vs among (three or more).
• Fewer / number for countable; less / amount for uncountable.
• Affect (verb, to influence) vs effect (noun, a result).
• Its (possessive) vs it's (it is); their / there / they're; your / you're; whose / who's.
• Lie (recline; lay-lain) vs lay (put down; laid-laid): I lie down. I lay the book down.
• Rise (go up, no object) vs raise (lift something).
• Beside (next to) vs besides (in addition to).
• Advice (noun) vs advise (verb); principal (head/main) vs principle (rule).
• Double negatives are wrong: I don't have no money → I don't have any money.
• Different from is standard, not different than.

Quick self-check

1. Choose: Neither the manager nor the workers (was/were) informed. (were: verb agrees with the nearer subject, workers)
2. Correct the pronoun: The prize was shared between him and I. (…between him and me: object of between)
3. Fix the dangler: Running late, the bus was missed. (Running late, I missed the bus.)
4. Make it parallel: The job requires patience, skill, and being punctual. (…patience, skill, and punctuality.)