Grammatical conventions are the shared patterns that speakers and writers use to form words and sentences. In edited American English, those patterns help readers recognize how the parts of a sentence fit together.
Conventions you can check in a sentence
- Agreement. The light flashes and The lights flash follow the usual subject–verb agreement pattern in the simple present.
- Word order. The bell rang is a statement. In Did the bell ring?, did comes before the subject. See syntactic order.
- Time relationships. We tested the bell yesterday and will replace it tomorrow uses different verb forms because the events happen at different times.
Grammar, mechanics, and house style
In editing, mechanics covers features such as spelling and punctuation. Some of those choices depend on house style. For example, two publications may use different rules for the serial comma while following the same subject–verb agreement patterns.
