Reader Idea | Grammar Clubs

• Run-on sentences:
  The main cause of run-on errors is the word “however”; many students punctuate the sentence by treating “however” as a conjunction. It is often not, and should not be preceded by a comma.
• Sentence fragments:
  Many fragments are created when students place a period at a grammatical boundary, like the start of a dependent clause. By doing so, students are showing awareness of grammatical structure but haven’t mastered it yet. “The sun melted the snow. Which led to flooding,” for example, shows a premature sentence boundary just where a new clause begins. Explaining the concept of clauses that can stand alone (independent) from those that cannot (dependent) allows for more overt understanding of those smaller units of a sentence and how they fit together.
• Misaligned modifiers:
  Alignment issues tend to arise when the sentence doesn’t begin with the main subject. If the writer begins with a participle (“Walking through the woods…” or “Painted on the side of the building…”), the word after the introductory phrase needs to complete the action (the entity walking or appearing in paint). It often doesn’t.
• Subject-verb agreement errors:
  Here, again, the writer needs to keep track of all parts of the sentence and how they relate. When words come between the main subject and verb, the writer can be thrown off. For example, “A team of experts is/are visiting the school” gives writers a singular subject (team) that is separated from its verb by a plural noun.
• Person/number/tense inconsistencies:
  When the writer is thinking too “locally,” person, number and tense can switch unnecessarily. In other words, the writer is failing to keep track of all of the sentence parts across phrase and clause boundaries.
• Antecedent/pronoun errors:
  This error also arises from the failure to make connections between two separated parts of a sentence. Whenever a pronoun is used, the writer should mentally connect it to an overt antecedent. If one is not there, reword. For example, “In Frank Rich’s column last week, he discussed….” Shows a subject pronoun (“he”) poorly aligned with a possessive antecedent (“Frank Rich’s”).

By the end of these exercises, students have compiled their own study sheets: What do they need to watch out for? Where are they vulnerable to punctuation and grammar errors? At a minimum, writers need to be able to identify the following crucial parts of a sentence:

• Know the main subject of a sentence
• Know the main verb of a sentence
• Know if a verb is conjugated or not
• Know what tense the verb is in
• Know where phrase and clause boundaries are

Student writers also need to know what their weak spots are. Here are some questions they can ask themselves to flag common weaknesses:

Questions to Self in Drafting of an Essay: What Needs Extra Scrutiny

• Between the first word capitalized in the sentence and the period or question mark at the end, is there a subject-verb pair that agrees and is conjugated in the tense you want?
• If a sentence doesn’t start with a subject, is there a subject-verb pair right after a comma?
• When you encounter a prepositional phrase, check to see if it is separating a subject-verb pair. Is there subject-verb agreement?
• Is your subject-verb pair separated by anything? Check for errors. Main subjects and verbs shouldn’t ordinarily be separated by comma.
• Did you use the word “however”? Look to its left and right. If you find full thoughts, you need a period or semicolon before “however” (not a comma).
• Does a sentence start with “which”? That can only happen if you are asking a question. Otherwise, you might have a sentence fragment.
• Anytime you use a pronoun, take a moment to backtrack to its antecedent. Do they align?

Susan Behrens is the author of Grammar: A Pocket Guide.