Basic mistakes you should avoid

1) Use of articles:

In English the use of both the definite and the indefinite article is quite tricky. Very often they
are used in Spanish (“me gusta LA naturaleza) but they aren’t in English (I like nature). In English
you can talk about The First World War and World War One or you can read the first chapter of a
book and chapter number two. You have to revise how to use articles in English. I generally mark
this (art) when I check writings.

2) Capitalization of titles of books and short stories:

In English, when you mention or cite titles of books and short stories you should know the
following. Short stories take inverted commas (“The Face in the Pool”) while titles of books and
longer pieces of writing take italics (Romeo and Juliet). I do not have italics here but you know
what I mean .Function words (those words that do not really mean anything by themselves such as
the,it,of,an,etc.) are not capitalized as in Romeo and Juliet (again in italics, which I don’t have here
but you do on your computers) unless the function word appears at the beginning of the title as in
“The Face in the Pool”. The words capitalized here are CONTENT WORDS (those words that do
mean something in isolation such as “face”, “pool”). I generally mark this mistake (cap).

3) Comma splice:

When two clauses are independent and equally strong a comma is not enough to join them. Take
a look at the following example:

I’m thinking of skipping English class, it’s very boring.

Here we have two independent clauses (independent grammatical structures each with its own
main verb), namely “I’m thinking of skipping English class” and “it’s very boring.” Well, this is a
COMMA SPLICE mistake because you need something stronger to glue these two ideas together. It
might be a semicolon (I’m thinking of skipping English class; it’s very boring.), a period (I’m thinking
of skipping English class. It’s very boring.), or a word that makes one structure depend on the
other (I’m thinking of skipping English class BECAUSE it’s very boring.). This is a punctuation
mistake, so I generally mark it (punc).

4) Parallelism:

If you write something like “I like bananas, oranges and apples”, you are enumerating things that
belong to the same grammatical category. In this case you have bananas (noun in the plural),
oranges (noun in the plural) and apples (noun in the plural). A very common mistake is to put
things together in an enumeration that belong to different categories as in “I like bananas, oranges
and when you look at me.” Here you have NOUN+NOUN+CLAUSE and therefore there’s no
parallelism. You make this mistake VERY OFTEN and I hate HAVING to check it, HAVING to explain
it, and HAVING to make jokes about it. I generally mark this mistake (par).