8.C Subject-Verb Agreement (STL-1.M)

The box of nails are heavy sounds fine out loud because your ear grabs the nearest noun, nails, and matches the verb to it. But nails isn't the subject. It's stuck inside the phrase of nails, which just describes what kind of box you mean. The actual subject is box, singular, so the verb has to be is. This is why the error survives speech but dies on the page: reading lets you check the sentence structure instead of just its sound.

The fix is mechanical. Find the main verb, then ask what phrases or clauses sit between it and the word it should agree with, and cross those out. Prepositional phrases (of nails, despite months of revision, in the report) almost never contain the subject, so bracket them off first. Interrupters set off by commas work the same way: they add extra information but sit outside the core sentence. In Neither of the proposals, despite months of revision, were approved, crossing out both leaves Neither was approved. Neither is always singular, no matter how many proposals are involved.

This connects to collective nouns like committee, team, or jury, which can take either a singular or plural verb depending on meaning, not position. The committee is still arguing treats the committee as one unit speaking with one voice. The committee are still arguing treats the members as individuals pulling in different directions. Neither sentence is wrong on its own; the choice depends on whether the group acts together or splits apart. This is the same skill as stripping phrases: look past the surface words to what the sentence is actually claiming, then let the verb reflect that.