Collective Nouns

Collective nouns provide a way to refer to a group as a single unit. In fact, “group” is an excellent example of a collective noun; when you refer to a group, you are referring to all members of that group at once as a single unit. Other collective nouns you'll run into frequently are: team, data, network, family, and company.

Because the collective noun is being treated as a single unit, use singular verbs with it. For example, you write:

“The group is going to the event”

not:

“The group are going to the event”

Similarly, you write:

“The network of servers is offline”

not:

“The network of servers are offline”.  

When you follow a collective noun (“network”) with a prepositional phrase that defines what’s in the collective noun (“of servers”), it can be tricky to remember to use the singular verb (“is offline” instead of “are offline”). The reason is that your ear may cling to the last word it heard (“servers”) and think “servers is down” sounds wrong. But “servers” is the object of the prepositional phrase, NOT the subject of the sentence, and it's the subject of the sentence that the verb has to agree with.

If you see a prepositional phrase, take a look at what the sentence would look like without it, and you’ll have an easier time figuring out whether to use the singular or plural. For example, try this:

“The network of servers is down.”

Hmm, shouldn’t it be “servers are down”? Let’s remove the prepositional phrase:

“The network [of servers] is down” -> “The network is down.”

Could I say “The network are down?” Nope! The subject is “network”, not “servers” (“servers” is the object of the preposition), and the verb must agree with the subject, so it should be “The network is down.” So “The network of servers is down” is correct.

Of course, English is crazy, so there’s an exception: if you are putting the emphasis on the individuals in a group, you can use the plural verb. For example:

“After the event, the Tech Content team were trying to find their cars.”

This is the equivalent of saying:

“After the event, the members of the Tech Content team were trying to find their cars.”

In this case, it makes sense to use the plural verb, because using the singular verb would make it sound like the cars are owned by the Tech Content team, not by the individuals on the team:

“After the event, the Tech Content team was trying to find its cars.”

However, I recommend you avoid this awkwardness entirely and refer to the individuals explicitly as I did with “members” in the second example.  

Removing the prepositional phrase to help you determine whether to use the singular or plural verb is similar to a trick you can use when you’re trying to figure out whether to use the subject or object version of a pronoun, such as “and I” or “and me”.

For example:

Sam and I went to the market.

He gave the feedback to Sam and me.

The first sentence is pretty easy. Get rid of “Sam and”, and you’ll quickly see that “I went to the market” is correct, not “Me went to the market.” So you know it’s “Sam and I went to the market.”

But shouldn’t it also be “Sam and I” in the second sentence? If you pull out “Sam and” again, you can try it both ways:

He gave the feedback to me. (Correct)

He gave the feedback to I. (Incorrect)

Why? Because a prepositional phrase takes an object, not a subject, so you must use the object form “me”. Therefore, “He gave the feedback to me” is the correct sentence, and if you add back in “Sam and”, you get “He gave the feedback to Sam and me.”

These little mental tricks of pulling out extra information from the sentence to get down to the core components of subject, verb, and object can be very useful for figuring out whether to use the singular vs. plural of a verb and the subject vs. object of a noun.

What other tricks do you use to help with tricky sentences? Add your tips in the comments below!