Suggestion/advice What if you want to recommend something, but not command it? If you’re giving suggestions or advice without ordering someone around, you can use the modal verb should.
You should try the lasagna. That guy should wear less cologne. Command On the other hand, if you want to command someone, use the modal verbs must, have to, or need to.
You must wash your hands before cooking. You need to be here before 8:00. Obligation or necessity Modal verbs can express a necessary action, such as an obligation, duty, or requirement. Likewise, the negative form expresses that an action is not necessary. Use the same modal verbs as with commands: must, have to, or need to.
We have to wait for our boss to arrive before we open. You don’t need to come if you don’t want to.
Habit To show an ongoing or habitual action—something the subject does regularly—you can use the modal verb would for the past tense and will for the present and future. The phrase used to is also acceptable if you’re talking about a habit that no longer exists.
When I lived alone, I would fall asleep with music. I will arrive early and leave late to every meeting. How to use modal verbs (with examples) Luckily, using modal verbs in a sentence is pretty simple. For basic sentences—the simple present tense—just remember these rules:
Modal verbs always come directly before the main verb (except for questions).
With modal verbs, use the infinitive form of the main verb without “to”.
So, if you want to brag about your ability to eat an entire pizza, you take the infinitive form of “eat” without “to”—which is simply “eat”—and add the modal verb “can” in front of it. The rest of the sentence continues as normal.
I can eat an entire pizza. For questions, you still use the infinitive form of the main verb, but the order is a little different:
[modal verb] + [subject] + [main verb]
So let’s rephrase the example above as a question:
Can you eat an entire pizza? Because modal verbs largely deal with general situations or hypotheticals that haven’t actually happened, most of them are in the present tenses. However, some of them can be used in different verb tenses, so let’s talk a little about how to construct them.
Present tenses We already covered the simple present above, but you can also use modal verbs in the present continuous and present perfect continuous tenses.