Agreement with collective nouns

Collective nouns such as jury, committee, audience, crowd, class, troop, family, team, and couple name a class or group. Ordinarily the group functions as a unit, so the noun should be treated as singular.

AS A UNIT

Example sentence: The planning committee granted its permission to build.

If the members of the group function as individuals, however, the noun should be treated as plural.

AS INDIVIDUALS

Example sentence: The committee put their signatures on the document.

When treating a collective noun as plural, many writers prefer to add a clearly plural antecedent such as members to the sentence:

Example sentence: The members of the committee put their signatures on the document.

Often you can choose whether to treat a collective noun as singular or plural depending on your meaning.

Example sentence with editing. Original sentence: The jury' has reached their decision. Revised sentence: The jury' has reached its decision. Explanation: The word 'there' has been replaced by 'its.'

There is no reason to draw attention to the individual members of the jury, so jury should be treated as singular.

Make sure that you are consistent within the sentence. In the previous example, the writer treated jury as singular when choosing the verb has, so for consistency the pronoun must be its.

Exercises:

Pronoun-antecedent agreement 1

Pronoun-antecedent agreement 2

Pronoun-antecedent agreement 3

Pronoun-antecedent agreement 4