Common Errors Essay

Common Errors Essay

            The papers this year are most definitely critiqued differently than previous years. The papers seem to be critiqued more on grammatical, sentence structure, and development issues. I have made many grammatical mistakes on all my papers, but one just stands out above all. That is comma splice.

            I am a repeat offender of the comma splice. A regular sentence must contain a main verb and a subject to be complete.  A comma splice is when you join two of those sentences together by a comma. The sentence may not have more than one main verb, and subject. So therefor, the comma splice was a killer for me! But, what I did do well is putting colons where semi-colons were supposed to go.

            Colons are used to introduce a list or quotation. Semi-colons are used to combine two sentences where the period has been left out. It is just to replace the period to give the sentence a more fluent flow. I would sometimes mix the two up, or I used the colon to combine two sentences if I forgot which one to put. I would always think of it like this. The colon has a comma on the bottom so it is like putting a comma in the place of a punctuation mark. And for the semi-colon I would think of it as a period since it has a double period in a sense. So I didn’t fully understand the rules to a semi-colon rule.

            Another issue of mine was hyphens. I knew that some numbers had hyphens in them, and some words. I never got when to use a hyphen other than that was how it was spelled, so I went along with it. A hyphen is used to combine a compound verb. So if the verb is not in the dictionary, you should highlight it. I followed that rule for a while until, I thought of some of the numbers in the alphabet are hyphenated. Then I thought that they are the more compound words like; twenty-two for instance.

            Other than errors, I have done some good things that goes along with grammatical errors. The indentions of the paragraphs are an everyday thing for me, but in the works cited section, indentions are hard to come by. They are very scarce in my papers. I did my works cited through a site called noodlebib, and it did not indent it so I just let it be.

            My common errors consisted of; comma splices, semi-colons, colons, indentions in the works cited, citing quotes correctly, sentence fragments, which to be perfectly honest I had no clue what it was before I had to do this essay, and hyphens. I have learned a lot from this essay and in general, about the grammatical errors that I make. I think that it will help me in the end to become a stronger writer, and also to become stronger in the grammatical section. Overall, from start to finish the only repeating issue was the comma splice. Also, looking at the papers from earlier in the year I think I have exceeded my expectations in improving from a grammatical standpoint.