Common Errors List

1.) Forgetting articles

·      Ex from Literacy Narrative: “I used writing as form of therapy.”

·      I left out the article “a”

2.) Fragments

·      Ex from Literacy Narrative: “Writing about a personal experience, how hard could that be?”

·      This sentence does not have a subject, making it a fragment

3.) Misuse of semicolons

·      Ex from Profile: “He collected butterflies, grasshoppers, and beetles; basically anything that he could get his hands on.”

·       I didn’t have an independent clause on each side of the semicolon, so it doesn’t work there

4.) Punctuation outside quotations

·      Ex from Profile: “He would take the wings of a butterfly and attach it to the body of the beetle, and make crazy “concoctions”, as he said.”

·      The comma should have gone inside of the quotations around “concoctions”

5.) MLA format

·      Ex from Profile: Discoveries

·      I underlined the title of my essay, which does not follow proper MLA format

6.) Introducing quotes

·      Ex from Literacy Analysis: “As the girls start to feel more comfortable around each other again, Livy reveals a secret to Melanie.  “I want to be just like him…do what he did.  I want to paint and sculpt” (9).

·      I should have used a colon here to introduce the quote