No Virginia, Common Errors Don't Have to Be so Common

Procrastination is an art. A contagious art, practiced by thousands, maybe even millions. The beauty about procrastination is that it's an equal opportunity habit, and everyone from business executives to pizza delivery boys and girls have perfected the form.

Unfortunately, it also gets people into a heap of trouble, especially students that procrastinate writing papers. What's the end result? A paper riddled with errors, sometimes making absolutely no sense. Some students, and I'll include myself up until recently, insist that they work better under pressure. The adrenaline is pumping and the ideas are flowing like the poetry you're supposed to analyze. In the mad rush to finish very little time is left to proofread, and the teacher or professor who is reading the paper is left trying to figure out what kind of grade to give.

This semester I have a graduate seminar professor who expects perfection in all of our papers, and since we're already or will become English teachers soon, she can't be blamed. She's lamented the fact that most of us have been cheated out of receiving proper instruction for our persistent errors, so I've decided to see if I was one of the cheated. Did my past professors correct me when I made an error in mechanics or grammar, or did they just pay attention to the content?After reading over several papers of mine, this is what I found out:

Odd word choice
Teachers and professors write this when they can't make sense of a phrase the student wrote. One seemingly innocuous word pulls the sentence into the pits of hell. I found an example of this in a paper I wrote for my undergraduate English Senior Seminar on The New Woman in literature. The sentence was "Cosima could have avoided falling under the prey of what society feels is the best position for women..................." The sentence goes on, but I don't want to bore you. Looking back, how can someone fall under the prey of something? Unless you're an ant and you fall under a hawk's dinner, that's not even clever!

Run-on sentences
Ah yes, one of the most common errors found in papers!
"I'm not sure whether he means that because the master has a slave, and the teacher has a student, that they're dependent on themselves to give orders or teach a lesson and have it reciprocated in the form of having the tasks and assignments completed, or if Tubbs expects the readers of the journals to know what he means, having written articles for them in the past and developing his own style."
Yes, this was one sentence! Proofreading would have helped here, because then I would have seen that this can be re-worded and broken into three sentences. Believe it or not, I still received an A!

Omission of pronoun
I literally just coined this term. Here's an example from another paper, "By acquainting himself with the people, is able to explore the Trobriand practices."
The missing pronoun here is "he." When people write in a rush, they forget that they forgot!

Overall, most of my papers were graded for content, so at least I know I was paying attention!

Courtesy of my "stickler for grammar" professor (and with great thanks, of course!) here are some tips when writing papers:

Commas and periods are the only things inside the quotation.
Semi-colons, question marks and exclamations all belong on the outside of the quotation.

Here's an example: Did you read the poem "The Catholic, Part 1"?
Yes, that was shameless self-promotion at its finest, but did you notice the question mark is outside the quotation mark?

Another example: I haven't read "The Catholic, Part 1," but I heard that Kat V is a fantastic CP!
The comma is inside the quotation mark

I've heard a former cooperating teacher tell his students this, and I want to share it with you as well, everything you hand it to your professor represents you, is a reflection of you, so make sure you look it over! When in doubt, proofread!