Make no sense or have no sense

Make no sense or have no sense When can I say  have no sense  and  make no sense? Is  have no sense  ever correct? Philip Mercier (circa 1689-1760) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons When can I say  have no sense  and  make no sense? Is  have no sense  ever correct? One of my students wrote this sentence in a narrative writing assignment: I tried to explain to him that this situation just  have  no sense. Can you see what the problem is? In fact, he has made two errors in one. The first is a verb agreement error, and the second is a word choice error. The subject  this situation  is singular, and so any verb that follows it should take an -s at the end in order to make it agree. We call this kind of error a third person singular agreement error. Here is the correction for this kind of error. I tried to explain to him that this situation just  has  no sense. The second problem is a little harder for learners to fix on their own. The reason is that  you need a wide exposure to English or a  corpus  to work out the rule. Can you say  have no sense? Yes, you can say  have no sense  but not in the way my student has used it. If you check a corpus for  no sense, you get this: As you can see, there is one example of  have  no sense  in the phrase  have no sense of shame. It is less common than  make/makes/made no sense,  but it is definitely possible. In developing error detection rules for the  Virtual Writing Tutor  (the ESL grammar checker) anytime a learner submits  have no sense  or  has no sense, the system will alert the learner to the word choice error and suggest make or makes, except when followed by the word  of. Check English Grammar with the Virtual Writing Tutor Try it yourself. Copy and paste any one of the following sentences and paste it into the text area of the  Virtual Writing Tutor  to see what it says. I tried to explain to him that these situations really have no sense. I tried to explain to him that this situation really has no sense. I tried to explain to him that this situation just  have  no sense. I tried to explain to him that this situation just  has no sense. Or one of these: I tried to explain to her that he have no sense of shame. I tried to explain to her that he make no sense of shame. Please follow and like us: