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Subject-verb agreement with parentheses
Hi all,
I have a problem with how to work with parentheses. What are the rules for subject-verb agreement?
E.g. Your cat (as well as your dogs) is/are diseased.
I thought that the sentence should read without the stuff in the brackets, so in that case it would be "is". But when I read it that way it sounds terrible. If one used commas instead of brackets, it would be "are", wouldn't it?
I have looked all over the net and I am none the wiser.
Please, for the sake of the paper I am correcting, do not guess :)
Also, I can't remove the brackets, I have to stick to the original formatting.
Thanks so much for your help.
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Believe it or not, "your cat" is the subject. "Your cat" is singular.
"Your cat (as well as your dogs) is diseased."
The phrase in the parenthesis shouldn't be included in the sentence. Think of it as no necessary information. If the information isn't important enough to be actually added into the sentence then it probably isn't included in the subject-verb agreement. ;)
You should be able to completely strike out a parenthetical statement without rendering the sentence meaningless or otherwise broken.
In most writing you rarely see this sort of parentheses usage. It can easily not make sense, is often too complicated, and the same thing can be said in a more well-written sentence or two.
If you could rewrite the sentence then you can change the words, ever so slightly, and make it flow much nicer:
Your cat (as well as your dogs) may have contracted a disease.
Your cat (as well as your dogs) may be diseased.
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