The phrase "are the basic elements" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when discussing fundamental components or parts of a larger concept or system.
Example: "In this course, we will explore what are the basic elements of effective communication."
Alternatives: "constitute the fundamental components" or "represent the essential parts".
What are the basic elements of curling?
These are the basic elements of the foot-and-mouth crisis but also of an ongoing furore concerning Scotland's fishing industry.
Those are the basic elements of a guitar and the sole unifying factor for the 17 soloists and ensembles that performed at the Guitar Marathon on Sunday at the 92nd Street Y, the closing event in the six-day New York Guitar Festival.
Down here, where legions of young geeks work in high-tech, dark satanic mills and stare into computer screens as they build "polys" (the polygonal structures that are the basic elements of computer graphics), the future doesn't seem likely to save the past.
In management, agreements and remunerations are the basic elements which each company has to deal with.
In alphabetic scripts, letters and speech sounds are the basic elements of correspondence between spoken and written language.
The aim of this work is to study the behaviour of hollow circular section tubular joints which are the basic element of space frames.
Codes are the basic element of the data that illustrate information that is of interest to the analyst [ 54].
It was the basic elements of the crimes, though, the modus operandi in all its bland commonness, that the police said led them to connect the two men pictured on the videotape to the stories they had been told by robbery victims in Chelsea, Gramercy and the East Village.
In the 1970s, centralized collective bargaining agreements (convention collective de branche) were the basic elements of the negotiation process in France.
