Correcting Common Sentence Errors

Richard Castle on "your" and "you're," Abby Sciuto on neologisms, Shawn Spencer on "literally" and "figuratively": as this sampler demonstrates, now and then you can learn about language with the television on.

After revising an essay until we are satisfied with its basic content and structure, we still need to edit our work. This checklist can serve as a guide when editing paragraphs and essays.

If you're someone who takes cynical comfort in the embarrassing mistakes of others, enjoy our collection of favorite typographical errors.

No matter how carefully we proofread our work, typos may still slip through. When that happens, you can blame the little demon known as Titivillus.

Some English instructors use these symbols and abbreviations to guide students during the revision and editing stages of the writing process.

Even professional writers get tripped up now and then by some commonly confused words: look-alikes and sound-alikes that our spell checkers will never recognize. Here are 15 of the most commonly confused words.

This exercise will give you practice in writing clear, complete sentences by correcting unnecessary phrase fragments.

This exercise offers practice in identifying and correcting needless sentence fragments during the editing stage of the writing process.

This exercise offers additional practice in identifying and correcting needless sentence fragments during the editing stage of the writing process.

These guidelines and exercises will show you how to correct a run-on sentence (also known as a fused sentence) with a mark of punctuation--a period or semicolon.

Often the best way to correct a run-on sentence is through one of the techniques of coordination or subordination. Here, in a nutshell, is how those techniques work.

Behind each one of these phony rules of writing lies a good idea, but there are also good reasons why these so-called rules should sometimes be broken.

When two or more parts of a sentence are parallel in meaning (such as items in a series or words linked by correlative conjunctions), you should coordinate those parts by making them parallel in form. Rewrite each of the following sentences, correcting any errors in parallelism.

The five websites described here focus on the most common errors in English: how to recognize those errors and (more importantly) how to correct them.