A Quick and Dirty Guide to Grammer Errers
By Trish Roberts-Miller
Some sentences that might help you remember how to identify errors:
Dangling off in space, sentences with misplaced or dangling modifiers confuse the reader. [mod]
Grammar rigidity and too much time on their hands is what makes a person obsess about agreement. [agr]
Even sentences with compound subjects, should not have a single comma between the subject and the verb. [comma usage]
A common form of non-parallel structure occurs when you have lists of activities, groups of nouns, and to write something in a different form. [non //]
Chester and Hubert got into a fight, and he said it was about vague pronoun reference. [ref]
You should put a comma before the coordinating conjunction in compound sentences and you just have to remember FANBOYS to know when to do that. [comma usage]
The reason people care about predication errors is because they can involve logical weirdnesses. [or] The error of predication is usually because you have a noun do a verb it can’t. [pred] (Some people would call both of these sentences “subordination” errors, since the dependent clause doesn’t have a “because” relationship to the independent clause.)
One can easily have a shift in pronoun error in which you shift your perspective.
A comma splice occurs when you connect two sentences with a comma, they really need something stronger like a semi-colon, conjunction, relative pronoun, or em dash.[comma splice]
Sentence fragments. Effective, but lots of people hate them.
If you start with one tense, you shouldn’t have shifted to another. [shift or tense shift]
If you use a thesaurus a parcel while writing, you can end up with sentences that are unintelligible.[ww]
The thunder of one’s thoughts can mean you don’t see mixed metaphors. [mixed met]
There is a problemization if there is a lot of passive agency to the language in that it is unclear if there is agency or what is done or what the causation is, which is made worse if there is what is called nominalization. [passive agency]