10.30 focusing on what someone wants or needs

If you want to focus on the thing that someone wants, needs, or likes, you can use a cleft sentence beginning with a clause consisting of 'what' followed by the subject and a verb such as 'want' or 'need'. After this clause, you use the verb 'be' and a noun group referring to the thing wanted, needed, or liked.

Here is a list of verbs which can be used with 'what' in this structure:

• adore, dislike, enjoy, hate, like, loathe, love, need, prefer, want

For example, instead of saying 'We need a bigger garden', you can say 'What we need is a bigger garden'.

• What we as a nation want is not words but deeds.
• What you need is a doctor.
• What he needed was an excuse to talk.

You can use 'all' instead of 'what' with the verbs 'want' or 'need' if you want to emphasize that someone wants or needs a particular thing and nothing else.

• All they want is a holiday.
• All a prisoner needed was a pass.

If you do not want to mention the agent in the above structures, you can use a passive form of the verb, after 'what' or 'all that'.

• What was needed was an organized struggle.
• All that was needed was to place strips of the paper in a thin rubber tube.