What I’m reading<is><are> newspapers.

[MrHarry9]

Hello everyone,
I have this nice little question to be answered.
Here it is:
Is it more correct to say :
What I'm reading is newspapers

Or

What I'm reading are newspapers?

To me both are correct. Tell me which one sounds better to you, or if any one of them is inappropriate to be used in a correctly structured grammatical sentence.
Ty in advance!
Kind regards ,
MrHarry

 

[natkretep]

I think this depends on the situation. If it's an informal and spoken comment, I'm happy to go with 'is', which, after all only needs to agree with the subject 'What I'm reading' which is notionally singular.

In more formal writing, the mismatch with the subject complement being in plural is more frowned upon, and you might just want to rephrase the sentence to avoid it.

 

[billj]

[What I'm reading] are newspapers.
[What I'm reading] is newspapers.

Both are correct.

In general, the pronoun "what" has the default value singular, but in examples with a plural predicative the singular verb may be overridden with plural "are".

However, the override is optional and plural "are" can be replaced by singular "is".

 

[se16teddy]

[What I'm reading] are newspapers.
[What I'm reading] is newspapers.
Both of these are grammatical. Neither sounds very natural. I can't imagine a real situation where I would want to bring the idea of "reading" to the beginning of the sentence like this.