From my point of view and during the writing of my essays; I noticed that I’ve made a lot of grammatical error over and over again. These errors made what I’m trying to express either too long/wordy or not appropriate which resulted in my sentences making no sense sometime. These grammatical errors may sometime throw the reader off and they may not get what I’m trying to say. The grammatical pattern of error that always comes up in my writing are misuse of commas, semicolons and having run on sentences where there are no punctuations to separate anything but if there is; it is a dropped one.
Usually when I used commas while writing; it was to separate two complete thoughts in any way I can. I would also reread anything I write and where I felt like I could use or take a brief stop I would just plug a comma in. This is not so as those uncalled for commas just threw away the meaning of the sentence and could cause the the reader to interpret the message in the story a different way. Through identifying this common error I’ve learned not to plug in a comma anywhere I feel like. Through the help of my tutor I learned that a comma can be used in different set of ways. It can be used to separate items in a series, to set off the introductory material, on both sides of words that interrupt the flow of a sentence, Between two complete thoughts, connected by and, but, for, or, nor, so, yet, to set off a direct quotation from the rest of a sentence, and for certain everyday material. This is how I learned to spot each of my different misusage and incorporated my previous knowledge into my writing.
Another punctuation problem that I have is that I make run ons. Run ons are sentences that goes on for a really long time without the use of a punctuation mark to take a break in between. These sentences can sometime make you run out of breath when reading them. Whenever I want to detect if I have a run on sentence, I just read over my work multiple times and see if anything seem strange in the way how I read that is. If I’m running out of breath or if what I’m trying to say does not make sense because there is no punctuation I try to fix it. To fix my run on sentences, there’s a lot I can do. Instead of trying to say a lot in one sentence i can just use a full stop to end that sentence and continue to another. The two sentences will be related to one another as context clues it will clearly express that and therefore I have no need to worry that my two sentences are completely different. Another way to get rid of run on is through the use of using semicolon. I use the semicolon in between two complete thoughts in a sentence whenever a sentence seem to have it. This way you can monitor how much is said in a sentence and if it all relates to each other or not.
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