Literature

More Wednesday Scene: Writing 101

by L. Richelle Murry

November 16 / 16

Hey again….Did you notice that there is a Writing/Literary Tutorial at the top of the blog page? I did promised it and I delivered. Now I’m adding more to the page. Found this at the Writing Center at Columbus State University, where I work my day job. This is from The St. Martin’s Handbook, Sixth Edition by Andrea A. Lunsford.  It’s title, The Top Twenty: A Quick Guide to Troubleshooting Your Writing. This is two-part post. The rest will be posted to the Writing/Literary Tutorial page. 

Readers judge your writing by your control of certain conventions, which may change depending on your audience, purpose, and context for the writing. Whether an instructor marks an error in a student assignment will depend on personal judgements about how serious  the error is and what the writer should be focusing on in the draft. Some of the student writing patterns identified here may be considered errors by some instructors but stylistic options by others. Statistically, though, these twenty errors–identified in nationwide research by Andrea A. Lunsford and Karen Lunsford–are the ones most likely to result in negative responses from readers.

 

  1. Wrong word
  2. Missing comma after an introductory element
  3. Incomplete or missing documentation
  4. Vague pronoun reference
  5. Spelling (including homonyms)
  6. Mechanical error with a quotation
  7. Unnecessary comma
  8. Unnecessary or missing capitalization
  9. Missing word
  10. Faulty sentence structure
  11. Missing comma with a nonrestrictive element
  12. Unnecessary shift in verb tense
  13. Missing comma in a compound sentence
  14. Unnecessary or missing apostrophe (including its/it’s)
  15. Fused (run-on) sentence
  16. Comma splice
  17. Lack of pronoun-antecedent agreement
  18. Poorly integrated quotation
  19. Unnecessary or missing hyphen
  20. Sentence fragment

There you have it. I’m sure this will help with your with your craft as a writer. As I said before, this is just the first part of this post. The rest will be posted on the Writing/Literary Tutorial Page. Enjoy your Wednesday, be blessed!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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