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When you write, it’s important to use correct grammar. This includes writing in complete
sentences. And to do that, you need to use a subject and a predicate. But what are subjects and
predicates? Let us explain the basics.
The subjects of the sentences above are shown in bold. Notice that, in each case, the subject is
the person or thing doing or being something.
Here, the predicate is “runs,” which tells us what the subject (i.e., “The shaggy old dog”) is
doing. More often, though, a predicate is a verb and some modifiers. We can see this in the
examples above:
This time, we’ve highlighted the predicates in these sentences (i.e., what the subject was doing
or being in each case).
But the same applies to complex sentences, even if this is less obvious:
Here, we have two clauses: a main clause (i.e., “This study is important”) and a subordinate
clause (i.e., “because it fills a gap in the existing literature”).
The subject of the main clause and the overall sentence is “This study,” with the rest of the
sentence serving as a predicate. But the second clause, starting with the subordinating
conjunction “because,” has a pronoun and verb of its own. As such, we can break this one down
as well:
No matter the clause type, though, you can tell a subject from a predicate by thinking about who
or what in a clause is “doing” or “being” something.
Subject Predicate