grammar check

10 Common Writing Mistakes

You’ve just completed the report for your boss or written a business letter, or finished off your paper for your college professor. You run it through spelling and grammar checks, and there are no squiggly lines to show any possible errors. You’re convinced your work is perfect, but unless you take the time to proofread, it may not be nearly as perfect as you assume. If you get lazy, there’s a good chance you’ll make one of the following common writing errors:

Incomplete Sentences

These are also known as fragment sentences. A full sentence will usually have an actor and an action, or to put it formally, a subject and a verb. Think of a sentence as a “thought.” The whole thought has to be expressed within the sentence.

“My cat is cross. Because she is feisty.”

The first sentence is fine, the second one is a fragment. You can either turn this thought into one sentence or change the second sentence to make it complete: “Because she is feisty, that often happens,” or simply, “She is feisty.”

Run-On Sentences

A lot of people think a “run-on” means the sentence is too long, but that’s not technically correct, although it’s often the case. If you use more than one subject and verb combination without using the correct punctuation, you have written a run-on sentence.

“I’m not sure if he’ll settle down in China it’s often difficult for Westerners to adapt.”

There are a lot of possible ways to fix this:

Write two sentences: “I’m not sure if he’ll settle down in China. It’s often difficult for Westerners to adapt.”
Use a semi-colon: “I’m not sure if he’ll settle down in China; it’s often difficult for Westerners to adapt.” Read the article on semi-colon use to see why this easy fix works.
Use a conjunction: “I’m not sure if he’ll settle down in China because it’s often difficult for Westerners to adapt.”

Another common run-on is called “comma splicing.” It means that you are joining two thoughts that could have been separate sentences with a comma. Use a semi-colon, add a conjunction, or split them into two sentences.

Similar Word Mistakes

This is awfully common. People write “your” when they mean “you’re,” they write “affect” when they mean “effect,” and they often mix up “it’s” and “its.” Unfortunately, these words aren’t interchangeable and have very different meanings.

Incorrect Tenses

Whatever you do, be careful how you switch tenses. Although there are times when you can do so, you need to follow the right formula. “I was putting on my makeup when the perfume bottle falls over,” is an example of incorrectly mixed tenses.

Comma Usage

It would be easy to write an entire blog post on when commas should and shouldn’t be used. It’s not really difficult to get your comma usage right, but you may have to study the subject carefully to gain an understanding of the rules. Since most people are muddled about where commas should go, you’ll be ahead of the pack if you can master the art.

Incoherent Flow

To keep your work crisp, clear, and concise, it’s important to organize your thoughts before you begin to write. If you don’t, you could end up with a hodge-podge of ideas that don’t make sense to your reader. What is the thought you’re trying to get across? Introduce it. What points will you discuss in order to reinforce your central idea? Organize them into paragraphs. What do you think this proves? Bring it all together to a conclusion.

Singular Noun with Plural Pronoun (or the other way around)

This can be trickier than it sounds. For example: “When the student council got together, they decided to approach the dean with their problem.” It sounds fine, doesn’t it? What a pity it’s wrong. The student council is a single body or entity, therefore, it cannot be a “they”. It may consist of people, but it’s not a person. Substitute “it” and “its” for “they” and “them” and all’s well.

Too Complicated

Sometimes bosses like this sort of thing. They’re impressed when you write “With regard to” instead of “Regarding” or “About.” They like “We are of the opinion” rather than “We think” and so on. Admittedly, none of these examples is actually wrong and does help you increase your word count, but using language like this can sound pompous and makes the message less clear. I have been at loggerheads with many employers about clumsy, formal phrases. Business communication should be clear.

The other danger that lurks in wait for those hoping to sound impressive is long-winded sentences are much easier to get wrong. Writing simply and clearly makes your work easier for you to check, and reduces your opportunities for error.

Here’s a lovely example of “correct” but long-winded writing:

A dual-member team proceeded toward the apex of a natural geological protuberance, the purpose of their expedition being the procurement of a sample of fluid hydride of oxygen in a large vessel, the exact size of which was unspecified. One member of the team precipitately descended, sustaining severe fractional damage to the upper cranial portion of the anatomical structure. Subsequently, the second member of the team performed a self-rotation translation oriented in the direction taken by the first team member.

What does this mean? Here’s the answer:

“Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after.”

Grocer’s Apostrophes

You’ve seen the signs outside stores: “Apple’s, banana’s and carrot’s special!” Restaurants are also often guilty: “The best pizza’s in town!” Those apples may be on special, and maybe the pizzas are pretty good, but the apostrophe use isn’t. Apostrophes signify a missing letter in an abbreviated word like “don’t,” and they can indicate “belonging to” with the exception of “its.” The apostrophized version, in this case, is an abbreviation for “it is”.

Trusting Spell Check

I love this topic, so I could go on and on about it. Let’s look at some typos that spell check will never notice:

“Oink dresses” (Pink dresses)
“Weeding dress” (wedding dress)
“Sinning with the choir” (singing with the choir)
“Beast psychologists” (best psychologists)
“Inhuman resources” (in human resources)

And my favorite is a mistake I sometimes see when someone is signing off a letter and write “Kind retards.” To avoid these errors, read through your work carefully, preferably aloud. Spell check is helpful, but only up to a point (or pint).

(Image courtesy of Chris & Karen Highland)

Title Capitalization, Spell Check and More New Word Counter Tools

This word counter tool originally counted words, characters, and letters. As more people found it, we started to get requests of what the users would like to see added to the tool. Over the years, we have added many of these suggestions. We continue to strive to keep this tool updated and to add new features which users have requested which make word counter more beneficial to all. We recently added the following features which you can now use:

Spell and Grammar Check

We’ve added a button to the top left of the Word Counter tool which says “Spell Check” Once you have finished writing, you can click this button and a spell and grammar check will be performed on what you have written and will highlight areas of the writing that may be grammatically incorrect or have spelling issues. It’s important to note that this shouldn’t be exclusively relied upon, and as with all writing, you should proofread what you have written, but it may catch some minor errors you missed or show you an area of your writing which may be able to be more clearly rewritten.

Different Cases

There may be instances where you want to have your writing (or certain portions of your writing) displayed in a certain way. The “Case” button just to the right of the “Spell Check” button gives you four options to display your writing in different ways. There are two ways to use this. You can highlight a certain portion of your writing, and only the highlighted portion will be affected by your choice. For example, if you highlight your first paragraph and choose “Uppercase,” then only the first paragraph will be turned to upper case and the rest of the writing will remain as it was. If you choose one of the options without highlighting any of your writing, the entire writing will be formatted by the choice you made. The four choices available are:

Uppercase: WHEN YOU CHOOSE THIS OPTION, ALL WRITING WILL BE DISPLAYED IN UPPERCASE LIKE THIS. iT’S THE SAME AS PUSHING THE CAPS LOCK ON YOUR KEYBOARD.

Lowercase: when you choose this option, all writing will be displayed in lowercase like this. even after periods, the letters will all be in lowercase.

Title Case: Also referred to as title capitalization, this gives the proper way to capitalize titles for your writing, articles and blog posts. It can often get confusing which words should and shouldn’t be capitalized in the title of the paper, and by choosing this option, it will automatically give you the correct way to display it. For example, the title of this article, “Title capitalization, spell check and more new word counter tools” gets transformed to “Title Capitalization, Spell Check and More New Word Counter Tools” when the title case option is used.

Sentence Case: This options will turn all the writing to a typical sentence construction. This can be convenient if you happen to forget to capitalize after periods, or if you tried some of the other case options, but decide you want to back to normal.

Reading Level

On the right side under “Details”, there is now a section at the bottom that displays Reading Level. The reading level is calculated by using the Dale–Chall readability formula based on 3,000 common words fourth graders understand. This can be useful if you’re writing to a certain age group to make sure your writing isn’t above or below their level.

Keyword Density Options

Under “Options” (top right corner) you can now choose the number of keywords you want displayed for keyword density. The default has been 10 words, but you can choose as few or as many as you wish to fit the particular type of writing you’re doing.

If there are other tools you’d like to see added to word counter, feel free to contact us or to leave a comment. We try to continue to add and update WordCounter.net with things the users would find beneficial.