Sometime ago, a student in Cambodia preparing for a special English-language scholarship test sent me an e-mail expressing puzzlement over these two sentences: "Particularly unfortunate was my failure ...

In English, our sentences usually operate using a similar pattern: subject, verb, then object. The nice part about this type of structure is that it lets your reader easily know who is doing the ...

On several occasions these past four years, I have pointed out that the pronoun “they” rather than “them” is the correct form of the subject complement in this inverted sentence: “The winners of the ...

IN last week's column, we looked at how inverted sentences allow us to abandon the normal subject-verb-complement (S-V/C) sequence so we can deliver the verb or its complement wherever we feel it can ...

Hello. I’m Mrs Shaukat and we’re going to find out about subject-verb agreement. I don’t always agree with my friends, but that’s okay. However, the subject of a sentence and its verb must agree. What ...

English typically uses a strict SUBJECT VERB OBJECT (SVO) word order in simple sentences, as in Students (S) read (V) books (O). This SVO word order becomes altered in many other English sentence ...

In last week’s column, I pointed out that the pronoun “they” rather than “them” is the correct form of the subject complement in this inverted sentence: “The winners of the contests were (they, them).