21st Century Grammar Handbook

used for the sentence subject. The words that are linked to the subject are not its
object—since there is no action transmitted from subject to object—but its subject
complement. Remember that a pronoun subject complement does not change form:
“It is I.”
Note that many linking verbs can also function in di erent ways, as transitive
verbs that do govern the objective case when their objects are expressed The musician sounded the trumpet In its linking form sound is usually followed by an adjective (not an adverb): The trumpet sounded rough When a linking verb is followed by an adverb, the adverb does not express a quality of the subject but of the verb The child looked blankly at the television screen The child looked blank is a sentence with look as a linking verb joining a person and a quality or condition of the person—blankness.
It is tempting to make living verbs agree with their subject complements rather than their subjects, particularly when the emphasis is on the complement rather than the subject or when the sentence is inverted My favorite animal is bears This sounds somewhat awkward, but it is correct, since the subject is animal and the complement is bears Bears are my favorite animal is also correct and less awkward. Is your favorite animal bears is also correct, as would be Are bears your favorite animal You can choose whichever of these constructions sounds best to you or will best suit your audience. Some rewriting might help, too Are your favorite animals bears See agreement and inversion.
Lists. More than three things put together grammatically constitute a list Lists can beset o from the rest of a sentence by a colon: Here are the parts piston, ring,
valve, spark plug, and hose If the elements in a list are numbered, put the numbers
or letters for each item into parentheses: There are four parts (1) pistons, (2) rings) valves, and (4) hoses The items can be divided by. commas or, if they are to be kept more distinct or are more complex, semicolons (especially if the items include other punctuation There are three important factors (a) items of value, including gold, silver, and platinum (b) insurance Lists can also be distinguished by putting each item in them on a separate line and starting each line with a number,
letter, or other marker:
nouns adjectives verbs
Such typographically emphasized lists can include punctuation marks at the end of each item or appear, as in the example, with only their spacing to mark them (see
emphasis). If the items in such a list are sentences or clauses, it is probably clearer to

end them in periods, semicolons, or commas. Adding “and” before the last item in lists on separate lines can be helpful, or it can prove tricky, especially when the punctuation is not suitable or the spacing leaves and dangling somewhere.
Within lists it is important to maintain parallelism, or equivalency among the items. Thus the list set on separate lines would be incorrect or harder to follow if we added another item like writing sentences too long The shift from simple nouns to a gerund phrase makes it hard to seethe relationship among the parts of the list. If the list is made up of sentences or clauses, it is particularly important to keep similar structures so that your reader can follow what is being said.
Little. The comparative forms of little in the sense of quantity are irregular little,
less, least. Little in the sense of small size is compared regularly little, littler,
littlest.” See comparison.
’II. An apostrophe plus “11” is commonly used to form contractions of future tense
verbs and nouns or, more often, pronouns: The dog’ll eat the chicken bone, and it’ll die Neither contraction normally appears in standard English writing, but those with nouns are considered particularly substandard.

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