Keep a List of Your Most Common Language Errors

Here's part of an article that is interesting, written by Peter Clark a writing teacher in Florida. You can read the full article here: www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=78&aid=173930. I have copied what he says are the most common writing errors he found among his students.

"In three years of teaching that course, I learned that students -- some of them in their thirties and forties -- committed many of the same errors in class after class.

- They wrote unintended sentence fragments.
- They wrote run-on sentences or spliced together sentences with a lowly comma.
- They failed to make subjects agree with verbs, or pronouns with antecedents.
- They misplaced modifiers. ("Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.")
- They confused "who" and "whom" and made other case errors.
- They could not form the possessive correctly.
- They misspelled many words.
- They had little control of punctuation.
- They'd often confuse one word or phrase for another ("discrete" with "discreet"). "