Some Classroom Errors

One thing I’ve done for my writing class this year is give them specific examples of common errors made by students who’ve taken the class in the past. Of course, I don’t include the names of the students whose works/mistakes I feature. I thought it might be interesting to show you some of these examples. All of the examples below were turned in for my Writing in Psychology class. I've indicated the primary issue in bold print. These are not terribly extreme, but if there is interest, at some point I’ll publish some of the more egregious errors I’ve seen. All with names left out, to be sure.

FAT:
1. It is believed that the easier and more quickly we can bring an example of something to mind, the more frequently we believe it occurs.

2. Therefore, it is apparent that we must rely heavily on our skills and abilities of social perception and attribution to correlate behavior with its causal source.

COMMA SPLICE:
1. Due to the recession a lot of businesses are going bankrupt, one of the most publicized is that of GMC.

VAGUE TIME REFERENCE:
1. At one point in time you could not watch television without seeing a commercial about the virus.

AGREEMENT IN NUMBER (Plural vs Singular problem):
1. The Psychoanalytic Theory attempts to look at the person’s family life as an explanation of their homosexuality.

SENTENCE FRAGMENT:
1. Many question if the reason why serial killers exists.

WORD CHOICE ERROR:
1. Skin color differences have transcended throughout history.

REPETITION:
1. If peer pressure influences adolescents’ decision making, then adolescents who are influence by their peers tend to let their peers influence their sexual attitude.

STATEMENT OF THE OBVIOUS:
1. People usually go through a lot during a normal daily routine.
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Why Can't I Proofread

Sometimes I despair of my proofreading abilities, even though I suspect that I'm actually better than a lot of folks at it. In a piece I was rereading last night for the umpteenth time I discovered that I'd written the word "mediation" where I meant "meditation." How many times I passed over that one I'll never know.

Of course, if that was my only error I might be OK. But I discovered that one major character had different colored eyes in two different places, that I'd changed the eye color for a minor character at one point but failed to change it elsewhere, that I'd described one character's eyes as "jade-black,"(Uhm, hello, jade is typically green," and that I'd written army where I meant navy. Even so, minor errors, you say? But how many times have I been through this piece? A lot, I'll tell you.

And I guess I can also tell you, you'll never catch 'em all. I think sometimes of myself as a perfectionist. In reality I have to admit I'm not even close.