English Composition Resources
Common Problems (Grammatical, Mechanical, & Stylistic)
Click on the item in the alphabetized table of contents below:
A: "a lot" | abbreviations | agreement | and/but | apostrophes | articles
B: block quotes | bolding/italics | bullets/numbers
C: capitalization | citing names | clarity | collective nouns | colons |
commas | comma splices | consistency | conclusions
D: dangling modifiers | dashes/hyphens | dialogue
E: e.g./i.e. | ellipses
F: feel bad | footnotes/endnotes | formal/informal usage
G: gender neutral language | gerunds | good/well
H: history of English | hyphenated words
I: "I think..." | indentations | introductions
M: may/might
N: numbers
P: parentheses & brackets | passives | possessives | prepositions | prepositional phrases | pronouns | proposals
Q: quotation marks | quoting
R: reflexive pronouns | respectively | revision | run-on sentences
S: sentences | style | subjunctive mood
T: tense | that/which | tilde | titles | transitions
W: who/whom
Y: yet
"A lot" is informal in usage. However, remember that "a lot" is a parcel of land. Try to find one word that means the same thing as "a lot." Some examples would be "many," "much," "several," etc.It's fine to use abbreviations, but the first time something is referenced, it should be written out completely.
In sentences, subjects must agree (in number) with verbs, and pronouns (in person, number, and gender) with antecedents.
Subject-verb agreement: If a subject is singular, the verb must be singular as well (or plural and plural):
Usually, problems with agreement occur when the subject is distant from the verb, and (an)other noun(s) comes between the subject and verb:
Pronoun-antecedent agreement: Pronouns must agree in person, number, and gender with their antecedents (the nouns to which the pronouns refer).
Person:
Someone is in 3rd person, and you is in 2nd person. To correct this, change to either:
Number:
Anybody is singular, and they is plural.
Gender:
Usually, you should try not to start a sentence with "and" or “but,” but it is not incorrect. It should be used for emphasis. (Otherwise, it's not good style, but it's not incorrect.) You can start a sentence with "and" if it is clear to the reader the connection with previous material.Apostrophes are used in contractions when omitting letters and for possessive nouns. Here are some examples:
The general rule is to use "an" before a word that starts with a vowel sound. All words that begin with A, E, I, or O start with vowel sounds. Some words that start with H and some which start with U can have either vowel or consonant sounds.
Take the words "hour" and "house." The H is silent in "hour," but aspirated in "house." [The technical terms for the sounds are a rounded back vowel for "hour" and a glottal fricative for "house."]
The same rules apply for words that begin with U:
The following proper nouns are always capitalized in English:
The general rule on citing an author's name is to use the full name at the first reference, then use only the last name in subsequent references. If you refer to two authors or subjects with the same last name, then you must include the first name to distinguish between the two people. A confusing example:
Does "Clinton" mean only Bill, or only Hillary, or both Bill and Hillary? (It gets even more confusing with two President George Bushes!) To clarify, you would include their full names or their professional titles:
The key factor to consider in all writing is to keep the reader on track. We have to play around with the language sometimes to over being overly repetitive. Here's an example:
Lots of repetition there. Here's a revised version:
Here's what The Columbia Guide to Standard American English (1993) has to say about collective nouns:
COLLECTIVE NOUNS are nouns designating a class or group of individual persons or things, all of them members of that class or group (such as "class," "flock," "group," “herd," "team," "committee," "bunch," and "cluster"). These nouns are distinctive as subjects because they can take either singular or plural verbs and subsequent pronouns:
These collectives are interesting too in that they can also be inflected for the plural to designate more than one such group of similar individuals or things; then they always take plural verbs.
Americans generally use the singular for the verb, but the subsequent pronouns will often be plural:
But note too that many nouns can be either collective nouns or mass or count nouns:
Note also that verbs following titles can sometimes be affected by notional agreement:
Source: Wilson, K. G. (1993). The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. New York: Columbia University Press.
Use colons to call attention to words that follow them. Use them to introduce lists or quotations, after the salutation in any business letter, and to list items at the end of a sentence. Think of the colon as the equivalent of the phrase "that is."
A comma splice is a punctuation error that occurs either when independent clauses (complete sentences) are joined only by a comma and no coordinating conjunction (and, but, for, nor, or, so or yet) or when a comma is used instead of a semicolon between two independent clauses.
In this example, the coordinating conjunction "and" should be after the comma. Here's another example:
The most common mistakes in grammar deal with consistency. Often, writers will shift person, number, verb tense, tone, voice, or discourse. Here are some examples:
A dangling modifier (also sometimes called a dangling participle) apparently modifies a word other than the word intended. Here's an example with the participle phrase "flying across the country":
Use a dash to set apart a short explanation or some extraneous information.
Use two hyphens--without any spaces between the words and hyphens--to indicate a dash.
When quoting dialogue, block indent the whole dialogue, indicating the characters' names whenever there is a change of speaker.
LORNA: We better not miss the train--Tokio's waiting.MR. BONAPARTE (of violin): Take him with you, Joe.JOE: It's beautiful...MR. BONAPARTE: Practice on the road.JOE (in a low voice): Return it, poppa...I have to do this, poppa.(from Clifford Odets's Golden Boy)"E.g." is exemplii gratis in Latin, loosely translated as "for example." (Transliterated: "an example for free.") "I.e." is id est in Latin, transliterated as "it is," but we use it as "in other words."
E.g., we'll use WebCT to discuss issues of grammar. I.e., I don't want to spend valuable face-to-face class time discussing grammar, so WebCT is a good forum for this purpose.
Use ellipses (. . .) when omitting part of a quote. Here's a quote from the Washington Post: "Yes, this was a difficult storm, but it wasn't a hurricane. It's becoming clear to me that Pepco does not have the capacity to do the crisis response that's necessary."
If I wanted to incorporate some, but not all, of the quote in my paper, I could write it like this: "Yes, this was a difficult storm...Pepco does not have the capacity to do the crisis response that's necessary."
"To feel bad" is a verb phrase all by itself.
"To feel badly" means to have a problem with the sense of touch, "badly" being an adverb to modify "to feel."
Common usage does change grammar at times (look at rap and chat language), and therefore the grammatical structures become valid. However, formal usage still demands adherence to standard American English grammar.
Even though words are in the dictionary (or even the OED), some are more informal in their usage. For example, shit is in the OED, but in a formal paper, one wouldn't use shit unless in a discussion of language use.
Using "s/he" is always appropriate. It can become cumbersome, however, when the pronoun is in the object position, for then you'd have to use her/him. The stylish way around all of this is to pluralize the generic person, and then there's no gender issue.A gerund is a verb ending in -ing that is either linked to a helping verb or stands alone as a gerund noun phrase.
Good is an adjective when it is used to modify a noun:
Good can be an adverb when it modifies a verb:
Well is almost always an adverb:
Well, when part of a compound phrase, can be an adjective:
A very brief history of the English language:
Old English lasted until just prior to the Norman invasion in 1066 and was replaced by Middle English which lasted until the beginning of the English Renaissance in the mid 15th century. Shakespearean English is actually early modern English. Shakespeare wrote all his work in the late 16th and early 17th century, well into the modern English period. So in essence, not much has changed as far as sentence structure goes. The main difference between Shakespearean English and today's English is the poetic quality of the language. Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter, lines of ten syllables with alternating unstressed and stressed syllables. And, of course, Shakespeare was a master with his vocabulary usage.
English is an evolving language, and many word pairs which were once separate, became hyphenated, then collapsed into one word. For an interesting discussion on this, click here."I think" (or "I believe") softens the tone of a person's writing in addition to stating the obvious. Saying "I think you should cut your hair" is a bit softer in tone than "You should cut your hair." When writing, you want to be as definitive as possible, make an argument, and claim a stake in what you write. Instead of saying "I think Bill Gates is trying to take over the world," say "Bill Gates is trying to take over the world." I can't argue with what you "think," but I can argue with the statement that Gates wants to take over the world.If you aren't skipping a space between paragraphs in a letter, you must indent the first line of a paragraph. If you skip a space, indicating a new paragraph, then the first line does not have to be indented.Here's the rule for introductions: Tell your reader what to expect in the paper, and be as specific as possible without going into detail.“May" means to have permission to do something.
"Might," in this context, means maybe one will do something.
Write out numbers under ten in narrative (unless you're writing technical specifications), and never start a sentence with a numeral.
Wrong:
Correct:
Use parentheses to set off supplementary matter or to enclose figures or letters.
The officers of the fraternity (the ones elected last month) called a meeting just before the dance to remind everyone of the no-hazing regulations.
Use brackets to add comments within a quotation. When you copy an original quotation exactly as it appears yet there is an error in the original, use the Latin term "sic" in brackets.
Use "'s" for possessive forms of proper nouns that end in "s"
If the proper noun is a family name, and you refer to something that belongs to the group, the noun should be pluralized, then an apostrophe used:
A bit too much. "She went to the kitchen for a drink" is enough.
Prepositions are sometimes adverbial particles attached to a verb (as in "go by"). Contrary to what you may have heard in the past, it is not "illegal" to end a sentence with a preposition such as this. It's not elegant, and publishers and editors will rework your text, but it's not wrong.
The omitted words in the first example are "the xxx" as in "by the store." In the second example, there are two particles attached to the verb "put."
This "rule" of not ending sentences with prepositions came from Latin. When the English decided to make rules for English grammar, they used the Latin rules and superimposed them on the English language. One little problem: English and Latin do not have the same roots; English is a Germanic language. In Latin, a preposition becomes part of the noun, not a word by itself, and therefore can never be at the end of a sentence.
Useless yet interesting trivia: Nouns in Latin and most other languages can change form when in a different "case." A case denotes how a noun is used in a sentence (subject, object, possessive). English has five cases (though the noun only takes one of two forms for all five cases), Latin has six, Finnish has eleven, and Votic, a Finno-Urgic language spoken in an area near St. Petersburg, Russia, has fifteen. For more information, read Tina Blue's article, "It's Not Usually Wrong to End a Sentence with a Preposition."
It's fine to use pronouns instead of repeating the proper noun as long as it's clear to the read to whom you're referring. That's the key factor.Usually when an organization asks for a proposal, it will have guidelines for how the proposal should be formatted. If there aren't established guidelines, any business writing handbook will include samples of proposals. Usually, a proposal begins with an executive summary, then the body of the proposal, then supporting material. With pictures and graphs, include source information at the bottom of the picture or graph, then include the source information in a reference list at the end.Use single quotation marks when including a quote within a quote.
When using quoted material, do so sparingly, and only quote that which is necessary. You want to avoid plopping large chunks of quoted material in your text (and I consider a "large chunk" to be a whole sentence) because you should try to paraphrase or summarize the original source. Now, with that said, here are some examples of incorporating quoted material into your paper.
If you introduce the quoted material, usually the first word is capitalized.
(Note the use of the colon to introduce the quote, and the proper way to cite the source.)
If the quoted material flows grammatically with the rest of your sentence, then there is no need to capitalize the first word.
(Note that "r" is in brackets; the original is capitalized, but the brackets tell the reader that you, the writer, have altered the original.)
Reflexive pronouns (myself, yourself, himself, herself, itself, ourselves, yourselves, themselves) reflect back to the subject/noun. Note how the reflexive pronoun takes the object form of the pronoun (my, your, him, her, it, our, your, them).
Reflexive pronouns should never be the object of a sentence:
The use of "respectively" requires parallelism. In other words, there must be a direct one-to-one correspondence.
As is always the case, make sure the reader can clearly differentiate items from one another.
The least number of times a paper should be revised depends on the timeframe of deadlines. Considering all the work you have to do as a student (and employment, family, etc). For a small paper, one or two revisions before submitting a first draft should be standard, and another one or two revisions before submitting a revised draft. I have been known to revise a two-page paper eight times before submitting it. But then I'm kind of geeky about things like that!Run-on sentences are compound sentences (two or more complete sentences in one sentence) that have not been punctuated correctly. I.e., two sentences in one without proper punctuation. Here's an example:
Two complete sentences ("the bookstore was sold out of the text" and "I was able to find it on Amazon.com") are connected with the coordinating conjunction "but." However, there should be a comma before "but." Without the comma, it is a run-on sentence.
I'll turn this into a mathematical equation where "S" is a sentence. There are four ways to punctuate compound sentences:
Stylistic techniques and word choice are used for catching a reader's attention and achieving certain moods. Here is one idea written in two different styles and moods:
In example (a), the focus is on Bill Gates's altruistic endeavors whereas in (b), the focus is on the objectives of the Foundation.
Verbs in the subjunctive mood express doubt, a wish, a recommendation, or something contrary to fact. In present subjunctive mood, the verb stays in the simple base form and does not indicate the number and person of the subject.
In past subjunctive mood, the same form as simple past is used; however, for the verb "be," "were" is used for all persons and numbers.
Use "that" with essential clauses, and "which" with non-essential clauses. An essential clause or phrase (also called a restrictive clause) appears after a noun and is essential in the sentence to complete the meaning.
If we remove the essential clause "that are broken," then we are instructed to repair all the windows. So the clause is essential to the meaning of the sentence. Essential clauses can also start with "who" or a noun.
The who-clause in the first example is essential because not all people are multilingual, and the proper noun Rambo II is essential because without it, it says that Stallone was only in one movie, and that movie is on TV tonight.
A nonessential clause or phrase (also called a nonrestrictive clause) adds extra information but can be removed from a sentence without disturbing the meaning. "Which" is used with nonessential clauses.
Nonessential clauses are set off by a pair of commas when they appear within a sentence; only one comma is needed when they appear at the end of a sentence. Also, nonessential clauses don't have to start with "which."
Periodical titles are either underlined or italicized. Since italics are easy to produce (CTRL-I or APPLE-CTRL-I), use italics since it looks better on the page. Back in the old days when we used typewriters, to type italics, we would have to change the typewriter carriage, so it was easier to underline.
Titles of major works (plays, movies, novels, books, journals, magazines, newspapers, CDs) are italicized. Titles of some other works and works within works (short stories, poems, articles, songs, chapters) have quotation marks around them.
Strong transitions in paragraphs help the reader. In American rhetoric, reading is writer-dependent. This means it is the responsibility of the writer to guide the reader through the work. Since paragraphs discuss one idea, and paragraphs should build on one another logically, transitioning from one to the next is an important rhetorical skill to master.There are categories of transition words and phrases you can use to make your sentences flow better:
Use "who" when it can be replaced by a subject proper noun, and "whom" when it can be replaced by an object proper noun.
The tricky part is when you have a clause that refers back to an object proper noun.
“Who" in this case refers to Phyllis (the object), but look at the structure of the second clause. If we replace "who" with the noun, "Phyllis" become the subject: Phyllis then gave it to Maleka.
"Yet" is used in negative statements and questions, to mean (not) in the period of time between before now and now, (not) up to and including the present.