While you are searching for online tutorials, asking family and friends, learning the best structures to write a paper, people forget about the grammar part, which is so important. Correct grammar is the one that makes the reader forget about the boring stuff, and get to the heart of the matter. As another pain in the neck for a foreigner who decides to return to their education in an anglophone country, I would like to draw your attention to the most frequent and most irritating mistakes in grammar while composing a paper of any kind and some good ways of how not to do that twice. For students needing help with grammar or overall paper quality, services like Domypaper offer professional assistance. Domypaper can help students with editing, writing, and formatting papers to ensure they meet academic standards, including grammar accuracy, helping you write my paper with confidence.
Subject-Verb Agreement
Few things will annoy a reader more than finding that writing contains a subject mismatched with a verb, either singular with plural, or plural with singular. Is the data clear? And – what data? Data is plural. The data are clear.
How to Identify Subject-Verb Mismatch
This is a very common error because of the distance between the subject and the verb. Check whether or not the subject is singular or plural, and adapt your verb accordingly. You can use a great trick: cut all the words in between the subject and the verb to see if the sentence still makes sense. If you’re struggling with complex assignments, the best services for lit reviews can also help refine your work, ensuring grammatical precision and clarity.
Misplaced and Dangling Modifiers
A modifier describes or clarifies something else if it is misplaced, it will leave your reader unsure what you’re actually trying to communicate. Readers of ‘Running down the street, the car almost hit me’ might think you meant that the car was running down the street. A revised version would clarify the relationship of the modifying phrase: ‘While I was running down the street, the car almost hit me.
Avoiding Confusion with Modifiers
Dangling modifiers are when what’s being described isn’t even in the sentence. For example, ‘After writing the paper, the revisions were easy’ is ambiguous because you don’t know who wrote the paper. ‘After writing the paper, I found the revisions easy’ is better because you know who wrote the paper. Don’t be ambiguous – make sure your modifier is right next to the word you’re modifying.
Run-on Sentences
A run-on occurs when two independent clauses (meaning they could each stand alone as a complete sentence with their own subject and verb) are erroneously run or conjunction (for, and, nor, but, or, so, yet, etc). This is a serious mistake that can make your writing near-impossible to grasp, and that can pummelled your reader.
Take the following sentence: ‘The study was comprehensive; it included data from many sources.’ This is a ‘run-on sentence’ – you can break it up with a period (or a semicolon): ‘The study was comprehensive. It included data from many sources.
A study by the grammar-checking service Grammarly found that run-on sentences accounted for 53 per cent of the kinds of errors in students’ papers that its software flagged.
Breaking Down Long Sentences
If you’re not sure your sentence has gone on too long: look for natural break points where at any moment the sentence could be divided up into shorter, clearer sections, separated by a period or a semicolon if the thoughts are related but still independent of one another. Your readers will thank you. Your paper will breathe better.
Comma Splices
A comma splice occurs when a writer joins two unrelated independent clauses only with a comma. Comma splices are a very common error that also makes a sentence sound awkward and unprofessional; the writer has to be careful here that the sentence does indeed connect two independent clauses, which would both be complete sentences on their own: I wrote my paper, I still need to proofread it.There are several ways of correcting this.
Correcting Comma Splices
| Incorrect Sentence: “I wrote my paper, I still need to proofread it.” | Correction 1 | Correction 2 | Correction 3 |
| Incorrect: I wrote my paper, I still need to proofread it. | I wrote my paper. I still need to proofread it. | I wrote my paper, and I still need to proofread it. | I wrote my paper; I still need to proofread it. |
Misusing Apostrophes
They’re used in contractions (‘can’t’), but much more often to indicate possession (‘the professor’s book’). By far the most frequent mistake that students make in writing papers is errors with apostrophes, most commonly with pluralisation.
For example: ‘the student’s are preparing for exams’, which is incorrect because student is plural, not possessive, and so it should read: ‘the students are preparing for exams’.
Possessives vs. Plurals
Another old chestnut is ‘its’ and ‘it’s’, which is perfectly all right. Its is possessive (‘The study has its limitations’) and it is a contraction of it is or it has (‘It’s raining outside’). If you are not sure, expand the contraction in your head (‘it is’, ‘it has’) and, if it doesn’t look right, you probably need its.
Pronoun Agreement
Pronouns have to match with their antecedents (the nouns they refer to) in terms of number and gender: if one is singular and one is masculine and the other feminine, there is an error.
Here, as in the sentence ‘Each student must bring his (or her) textbook’ (his is singular, hence their is plural): Each student must bring his textbook is wrong.
Clarifying Pronoun References
Ambiguity may also arise when a pronoun refers back to an antecedent noun whose precise identity we’re not certain about, as with the following sentence: When Jessica met Rachel, she [who?] told her [who?] to submit the paper.And we don’t know whether it’s she and her that refer back to Jessica or to Rachel, so the sentence is ambiguous. Don’t be ambiguous about the pronoun’s antecedent returning exactly to the right antecedent noun, and don’t have the pronoun mismatch the antecedent in gender or number.
Incorrect Word Choice
At other times the entire wrong word is used. Homophones – words that are pronounced the same but have different meanings – are especially liable to be mixed up: affect and effect – the former is usually a verb (meaning to have an influence on) and the latter a noun (meaning the result).
Choosing the Right Word
Related to this is another common mistake with then and then, where then refers to time and then is used in comparison (It was harder then than it was last time is the wrong way around; I studied harder than I did last time is the way to use it in a comparison). If you’re not sure, just look up the word to make sure you’re using the correct one for the context.
Conclusion
A few grammatical errors can render an otherwise tidy essay messy. You’ll best serve your own writing clarity and appearance if you revise for typical troublespots: subject-verb agreement, mixed pronoun reference and run-ons. Take time to hand check your work, at least sometimes, and use a spell- and grammar-checker for another round of review. Again, the devil can be in the details.
