For example, in the sentence, “He ran to the beach,” the verb is “ran” because running is an action. Think about other words that describe actions. “Walk,” “think,” “play,” and “drive” are all action words and work as verbs.
If you have trouble finding the verb in the sentence, “Jack was thinking about the test,” find the word that ends in “-ing. ” In this case, it’s “thinking,” which is also the sentence’s verb. The “ed” and “en” endings are sometimes irregular in English, so the suffix guideline isn’t always reliable. For example, typically the “ed” ending is added when a verb is put in its past tense, but the word “thought” is the past tense of “to think. ”
Let’s conjugate the verb “think” through all it’s forms: infinitive = to think, past tense = thought, present tense = think, past participle = have thought, present participle = am thinking. These are all different forms of the same verb.
The different forms of “to be” are: is, am, are, was, were, been, and being. Memorize these so you catch the different versions of “to be” in a sentence. In the sentence, “John is not happy about going to his aunt’s house,” you can probably identify “going” as a verb because it’s an action. But in this sentence, “is” is also a verb, because it’s the present tense of “to be. ”
In the sentence, “He was running to the beach to see the show,” both “running” and “see” are action words, but only one is the main verb. Underline both to figure out which is the main verb.
Think about if you converted the sentence, “He was running to the beach to see the show” into the past tense. Would you say, “He was running to the beach to saw the show” or “He ran to the beach to see the show”? Clearly the first one doesn’t make sense. That means the main verb is “running/ran. "
In the sentence, “He was running to the beach to see the show,” we figured out that “running” was the main verb. Now check the sentence to see where the subject is. Who or what is doing the action? In this sentence, “He” is doing the action, and that’s the subject. Since verbs usually come right after the sentence subject, this confirms that “running” is the verb.
