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Jose Luis Arredondo

Instructor. McCann

English 1301 – 125

September 22, 2023

Common Mistakes in Writing

The most common forms of mistakes in writing are issues with fragment sentences, the subject,

comma splices, and subject verb agreement. To begin with, a fragment sentence is essentially an

incomplete sentence that is missing its subject or verb. For example, the sentence “Using Twitter

helps to gain popularity” is a sentence fragment as it’s missing its subject due to the fact that the

sentence doesn’t necessarily tell us who Twitter is helping to gain popularity. In order to fix this,

we’ll need to simply add a subject into the sentence. The subject is basically any noun or

pronoun the relates to the verb used in your sentence and it’s a very important part of sentence

structure as it lets you know who you’re talking about. For instance, this can be seen in the

sentence “Artists will usually choose to post their art on social media” where the subject of this

sentence is the artists. Besides the common mistakes with subjects, it’s also important to note

how to properly connect each sentence as well. Usually, this mistake is made through comma

splices which is when you choose to connect two sentences with only a comma and no

conjunctions. Name this can be seen in the sentence “Twitter allows artists to better their work,

artists can gain critical feedback on Twitter.” See how choppy the sentence sounds, well that’s

because both sentences are independent and don’t necessarily have to be connected. In order to

fix this comma, splice we could either use conjunctions like for, and, nor, but, yet, and so or we

could also instead choose to separate both with a period after the first sentence. In addition it’s

important to note that for these sentences to be independent they also need to have proper subject
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verb agreement. Subject verb agreement is basically the correct usage of a verb in a sentence

based on whether the subject is single or plural. For example, in the sentences “ The artist

become more popular due to Twitter ” we can see that the example sound choppy as the correct

form of become is not being used. In order to fix this we’ll have to change the verb depending

on the plural or singular state of the subject. This won’t be difficult though as we easily change

become into its singular form becomes given that our subject artist is a singular noun.