How to deal with collective nouns

We had a question from a student about how to deal with words like audience and police when writing. These belong to the group of words known as collective nouns, because they refer to a collection of something. The police are a collection of policemen (and women) and an audience is a collection of watchers or listeners.
The difficulty arises when deciding whether they can
a) be plural and
b) take a singular or plural verb.

Police is a fairly easy one, because it can never be plural and always takes a plural verb.

• The Glasgow police are investigating the crime. The Oxford police have made a statement. 
  

If we want to talk about the police in several places (more than one collection of police people) we would need to say police forces or police departments making the force or department plural.

• The Glasgow and Oxford police forces are working on the problem.
  

With other collective nouns, many can be made plural, but when singular, American English favours a singular verb, while British English uses either a singular verb or a plural verb depending on the meaning of the sentence.

Compare:

• The governments of all the European countries are meeting today to consider unemployment.   In this sentence, we must have a plural verb because we are talking about more than one government - the governments of France and Spain and Greece and so on.

• The government are at loggerheads today over the issue of unemployment.   In this sentence, there is only one government, but we use a plural verb, because we mean 'all the individual people in the government'.

• The government is introducing new legislation to help lower unemployment.  In this sentence, there is only one government, and we use a singular verb because we mean 'the state' - a single, legal, elected body.

Compare:

• Audiences at the Albert Hall are unhappy with the repair works.  We have more than one audience, so it is plural and takes a plural verb.
• The audience at the Albert Hall are unhappy with the repair works.  We have one audience, but use a plural verb because we mean 'all the individual people in the audience'.
• The audience at the Albert Hall is unhappy with the repair works.  We have one audience, and use a singular verb, because we mean this particular collection of 'listeners' - a single group or collection of concert-goers

How we treat these words depends on whether we see the individuals in them acting as a group doing the same thing = singular, or acting as individuals who happen to belong to the same group = plural.


Other collective nouns are treated the same way, words such as
Armed forces: army / navy / airforce / coastguard / militia / fire brigade / etc.
Corporate groups: board / business / company / committee / corporation / firm / etc.
Governance: council / parliament / electoral body / cabinet / senate / court / jury / house of representatives / house of commons / etc.
Educational groups: class / faculty / group / department / school / college / university / etc
Recreational groups: team / club / society / etc
Other people: family / majority / minority / public / youth / elderly / blind / disabled / etc

Be careful with plurals, though, because some of these cannot be made plural, like public, blind, elderly, and so on, although they may still take a plural or singular verb in Br. Eng depending on the meaning.