Start-of-School Grammar Lessons

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The month of June means the start of school here in the Philippines. Among the first assignments given to grade school and high school students are the different branches of science, definition of basic terms (What is "technology"?), and basic rules of grammar. I remember during our first day in Geometry, our teacher gave us what I thought was an impossible assignment: the definition of the "undefined" terms of Geometry. Before you head on to Google, they're simply: point, line, and plane.

Now the lessons below are not likely to be given as first-day-of-class assignments, but I'd like to share them with you, Student, anyway.

1. One of the...

Wrong: record Correct: records

The expression one of the is always followed
by either a collective noun or a plural noun. It means "one of several..." or "one of many...."

Example:
One of the boys is sick. (plural)
One of the audience was a famous singer. (collective)

Hence, the correct form is one of their best sounding records yet.

Note that although the noun that follows is plural, the verb agrees with the singular, denoted by one.
Hence, the verbs used in the examples are singular (is, was).

2. Subject-verb agreement

Wrong: mixes Correct: mix

In this second image, the plural noun the new tunes does not agree with the verb mixes. This error commonly arises when the verb is closer to a singular noun which it does not modify. In this case, that noun is album. The correct verb is mix. Taking away the modifiers will make the issue clear:

"...it will be interesting to see and hear how the new tunes mix up with their...."

Wrong: brings Correct: bring

Our third screenshot shows another sentence that suffers from a subject-verb agreement error. The verb brings does not agree with the obviously plural subject, Christian and the rest of Anberlin, bassist Deon Rexroat, guitarists Joseph Milligan....

Note that you shouldn't confuse this with appositives, which do not affect the verb. The sentence would have been correct had it been written as:
Christian, along with the rest of the band, etc...

You might ask, why is that? Well, the conjunction and makes the subject plural, and as you can see, there are three ands used. Before you jump to appositives to learn the difference, let's proceed to two more examples.

Wrong: she been Correct: she has been

3. Verbs and Typos - I want to believe that the errors here are merely typos. But to explore these a bit, the missing word on the left example is the verb has. It completes the participle form she has been given the chance....

In the example below, a pronoun (she) should come after Does, and the present participle has been should come before heartbroken to make the sensible question: Does she like the role because she has been heartbroken in real life?