I believe it was Paul Roberts, my favorite grammarian, who said that, for students, learning to identify subjects and verbs is the most difficult aspect of learning about grammar. Once a person knows how to identify subjects and verbs, all the other grammatical concepts can be added to that knowledge relatively easily. For some people, especially for those who have studied a foreign language, the task is easy; for others, it causes some frustration. The way we have been teaching grammar does not help. As I suggest in my proposal for a KISS curriculum, subjects and verbs should be studied thoroughly in grades four and five -- when the writing of students is much simpler and thus subjects and finite verbs are easier to find. But because we are not doing that, I need to address the problem here.
     We need to remember that any normal three-year-old already has an excellent command of subjects and verbs. They all know how to use them, and, for the most part, they use them correctly. Our task here, therefore, is to make that unconscious knowledge conscious. Perhaps the best way to do that is to consider the way most sentences work. Normally, a sentence names something and then says something about whatever has been named:

Our house is at the lake.
She reads difficult books.
He resembles a clown.

Find the Verb First

     Different people's minds work differently, and some people seem to find it easiest to identify subjects first and then the verb that goes with them. If you are stumped, try that, but it may be easier to identify verbs first. Several methods for identifying verbs have been proposed. Individually, none of them seem to be successful, but each may help.
     The first is the definition of verbs as words that "show action or state of being." The definition is basically true, but it is probably too vague -- what is meant by "show," and by the even vaguer "state of being"? In

is, are, was, were, have, has, had, do, does, did, could, would, shall, should, ought

can (when it does not mean the thing)
may (when it does not mean the month)
might (when it does not mean strength)
must (when it does not mean "necessity)
will (when it does not mean desire, or the legal 
      document)

    Another simple way to check to see if a word CAN BE a verb is to use it to fill in simple blanks to make acceptable sentences:

She/They ______.
She/They ______ it.

Tense refers to the expression of time relationships:

Past: He walked. He was walking. He did walk.
Present: He walks. He is walking. He does walk.
Future: He will walk. He will be walking.

In this sentence, you could change "time" to "timed" and still have a meaningful sentence. Thus "time" here functions as a verb. But in the sentence "Do you have the time?" "time" does not function as a verb because you cannot sensibly substitute "timed."
     Perhaps a more helpful guideline is that words that can be verbs do not function as verbs when they are directly preceded by "a," "an," or "the," or by possessives (his, their, Mary's):

They made the play.
She opened a can.
It is Mary's can.
The lawyer read the will.
His will was short.

     A verb phrase, in the simplest sense, is a group of verbs that work as a unit:

They were working on the road.
They would be working on the road for a long time.
She is going to go to the store.
He ought to read this book.
Bill has to do his homework.

Would they like to come to supper?
She has often said that they would.
They do, in this case, have to go to court.

     Finite verbs are not easy to define. Perhaps that is why even many experienced English teachers do not know what they are. (Ask some.) The concept, however, is essential because verbs are used in sentences in many different ways. A finite verb is a verb that makes a sentence an acceptable sentence. Verbs used in other ways in sentences are called Verbals. Verbals are the topic of Level Four, so at Level Two your objective should be to find the finite verbs (which you will underline twice) and ignore the verbals. Consider:

1. They went to the zoo to see the monkeys.
2. He likes everything from hunting to fishing.
3. Anthony's driving is dangerous.
4. Hearing his mother call, Paul always went to her.
5. Sent to the store by his mother, he went 
     to the park instead.

     The preceding explanation should help you distinguish finite verbs (which we underline twice) from verbals, but remember that you are expected to make mistakes. What you are after is not the kind of knowledge that you can learn and simply store in your brain (such as dates and math tables), but rather a kind of knowledge that you can apply in any sentence that you read or write. That kind of knowledge requires practice. Don't worry if, on the first few exercises you do, you have trouble with the verbals. They will fall into place, but you need to focus on one or two things at a time. In other words, if you are having trouble identifying verbs in general, you will definitely have trouble distinguishing the finite from the verbals.

Note that a finite verb phrase cannot begin with "to." Thus in "Bob went to his room to do his homework," "to do" cannot be a finite verb. One can, however, consider "to" plus a verb as part of a verb phrase if the phrase begins with another verb -- "He wanted to do his homework."

     Always work one pattern at a time -- find the verb, find its subject(s), and then find its complement(s). I have seen many students who underline a verb here, another one there, then perhaps a subject from a different pattern somewhere else. Such students never know when they are done, and they almost never do a good job. Work systematically, sentence-by-sentence, one pattern at at time.

     If you find the finite verb first, you can use what they teach in middle and high school to help you find its subject. Unfortunately, most teachers don't give students everything they need. Teachers say, "Find the subject by making a question with 'who' or 'what.'" If the sentence is

     In addition to the "who or what + verb" question, we need two additional rules:

1 If a a verb is outside a prepositional phrase, its subject cannot be inside one. 

2. The complement of one verb can NEVER function as the subject of another. There are NO exceptions.

     As suggested at the beginning of this page, the basic sentence pattern is subject / verb / optional complement. We each figured this out for ourselves, as babies, and to this day our brains still expect the same basic pattern. Generally speaking, our brains will take the first noun phrase as the subject of a sentence. As we grew older, however, we mastered a few exceptions. An important one involves words that denote time: