Watch Those Plurals!

Greetings again. I hope you’re doing well.

This summer, as part of my teaching, I’ve been providing feedback on drafts of journal articles. In addition to noting strengths and weaknesses of content and organization, I’ve been noticing aspects of the use of English.

As usual, I’ve been seeing more problems with verb use than with noun use. Verbs tend to have more forms than nouns do, and many verbs are irregular. Also, knowing what verb tense to use can be difficult, especially for some non-native speakers of English.

However, nouns too can pose problems, even for some native speakers. Typically in English, forming plurals of nouns is easy: Just add an s (or, for some nouns, an es). However, a few English nouns don’t follow this pattern and so can cause difficulties.

For example, this summer I reviewed drafts of at least 2 papers in which the author mistakenly used criterion as a plural. Actually, criterion is the singular form, and criteria is the plural. (Similarly, phenomenon is singular and phenomena plural.)

Also, one author seemed unsure of the plural of genus. Normally the preferred plural is genera.

A few of the authors sometimes forgot to add an s or es to make a typical noun plural. Generally, these authors were native speakers of a language without a plural form. I advise such authors to check each noun in this regard before submitting a paper.

Although noun use generally is easier than verb use, do check that all plural nouns are in the proper form!

Until the next post—

Barbara