3.5 Grasp Technique F5 (Include subject and verb in the first 9 words of a sentence)

What is a subject and a verb?

Read the following sentence.

The cat sat on the mat.

In this sentence, there’s only one verb. The verb of the sentence is ‘sat’.

Verbs are words that show one of the following three things.

  • An action (e.g. to sit, to investigate, to show, to prove, to hypothesize)
  • An occurrence (e.g. to develop, to happen, to become)
  • A state of being (e.g. to be, to seem, to appear)

Every verb in a sentence must have a subject. The subject usually answers the following question:

Who or what is doing or being the verb?

In this sentence, the cat is doing the sitting. Therefore, ‘the cat’ is the subject of the verb in this sentence.

Photo by Cyrus Chew on Unsplash

Now let’s look at some examples that are more relevant to research papers.

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