It's always important to make sure your subjects and your verbs agree. It makes the sentence easier to understand and lets the reader clearly see which verbs and subjects pair together. This sounds complicated, but it actually just means that the subject and the verb need to match in number. Singular subjects are paired with singular verbs and plural subjects are paired with plural verbs.
You need to be careful about sentences that contain linking verbs, such as: is, am, were, was, etc. It's also easy to mess up sentences that begin with the words here or there. These words are not the subject, so the verb isn't meant to match them. It can get confusing because we often think of the subject as coming before the verb, but that isn't always true. It's also easy to get confused on a sentence with a prepositional phrase between the subject and the verb. It can help to read the sentence carefully and figure out which subject is doing the action, as that is the one that the verb pairs with.
I write short stories frequently, and upon proofreading I often find that I have small errors such as issues with subject-verb agreement. I'm using one such sentence as an example here:
"There is a couple of rules that you ought to be aware of before attempting something like this."
This sentence is incorrect because I messed up the second part of subject-verb agreement I mentioned. "A couple" is plural, even though it might not look like it. Since it is plural, the verb needs to be "are," not "is." The correct way to write this sentence would be, "There are a couple of rules that you ought to be aware of before attempting something like this." It's just a small change, but it makes the sentence make more sense.
Why should you care about whether your subjects and verbs agree with each other? For one thing, it shows up frequently, even if you're not always aware of it. Sentences that agree are more cohesive and help the reader understand which subject is doing which action. It's also important because it's such a simple grammar rule; people may be less likely to take you seriously if you don't bother with something that pops up as frequently as this one does.
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