Example:
What is/are important are not your mistakes, but how you respond to them.
Which option makes more sense grammatically?
asked Jul 7, 2015 at 12:50
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3Native speakers would tend to use "is". What is important is not your clothes and your possessions but your character.– TᴚoɯɐuoJul 7, 2015 at 13:58
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@TRomano I think gramatically you need and "is" in the first "is/are" pair. I'm struggling to figure out the actual reason other then the "What is important" is a figure of speech meaning essentially "Don't worry about thing A which seems bad instead worry about thing B which is the more important consequence." The other "is/are" pair (not asked about the OP but which you changed to "is") can be both though no?– DRFJul 7, 2015 at 14:56
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@DRF: What are important are... is avoided, to be sure.– TᴚoɯɐuoJul 7, 2015 at 15:48
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1I conceptualize mistakes as a subject complement (a completer of the subject after a linking verb) rather than an object (a recipient of action). There are other systems which use these labels and define sentence parts differently. The OP does not start with what is important as a subject, but asks which word should follow what. Whether the complement is singular or plural will certainly influence the main verb in the sentence then: Who is nice is that user, AmD. Who aren't nice are those users who disagree with Jim Reynolds. No??– Jim ReynoldsJul 8, 2015 at 8:41
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1@Jim Reynolds In this case that grammar is a little more difficult than I thought. I see. Thanks for your comment.– user18856Jul 8, 2015 at 11:01
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1 Answer
Neither of them make sense, grammatically, because mistakes is plural and how you respond is singular.
If we are forced to make a choice between the two, the best option would be to use is, because it's less of a stretch to consider mistakes as a collection (that is a singular set of mistakes), than it is to try to justify writing What are important is (or are) how you respond . . . .
I would personally not be comfortable writing mistakes is in this context, however, at least not in and I'm a pretty liberal grammarian (sometimes even a grammamatician). In conversational speech, it's the kind of thing many of us do without many others noticing or caring much.
The better option would be to re-write around the problem, for example:
It is not your mistakes that are important, it is how you respond to them.
