Top 20 Errors in Undergraduate Writing
Top 20 Errors in Undergraduate Writing The Top Twenty: A Quick Guide to Troubleshooting Your Writing Readers judge your writing by your control of certain conventions, which may change depending on your audience, purpose, and writing situation. For example, your instructor may or may not mark errors in your paper if he’s more concerned with its argument or structure than he is with sentence-level correctness; he could also decide an error is not serious. Some instructors may even see the errors listed below as stylistic options. However, a large-scale study by Andrea Lunsford and Karen Lunsford (2008) found that these errors are the most likely to attract readers’ negative attention. Before handing in your papers, proofread them carefully for these errors, which are illustrated below in the sentences in italics. THE TOP TWENTY 1. Wrong Word Wrong word errors take a number of forms. They may convey a slightly different meaning than you intend ( compose ...