A grammar check is always important when it comes to essay writing. The reason is that the scores of these essays carry a good weight on grammar. Therefore, one needs to ensure that a grammar check is also a part of one’s proofreading activity. However, most of the students do not know how to perform the grammar check activity. Therefore, through this article, you will know the common grammatical mistakes and steps to resolve them.
Punctuations
The first thing to check to consider for a grammar check is the usage of punctuations. The right punctuation is always important to make your content readable and acceptable. Most of the students often get confused in certain punctuations such as comma and semicolon. However, with regular practice, one can inculcate the right usage of punctuations.
Subject-Verb Agreement
Subject-verb agreement is one of the basic concepts of grammar. However, due to lack of time students make mistakes in subject-verb disagreement. A subject-verb agreement shows that a singular subject uses a singular verb and plural subject uses a plural verb. For example, “he is” is the right usage, whereas “he are” is wrong. Such mistakes generally happen in case of lengthy sentences.
Spellings
Spellings are very important while writing any piece of article. It is the most basic element of English. Most of the times, spelling mistakes are avoided while using text editors such as Microsoft Word. However, sometimes students might unknowingly add the wrong spelling to the text editor’s dictionary. Doing so will never detect the wrongly spelled words. Therefore, you need to ensure that you check each and every word while proofreading.
Tenses
Checking the tenses in any article can be very complicated. The reason was that while proofreading an essay for any issues on tenses, one tends to go with the flow of the essay. As a result, it becomes difficult to look out for tenses for every sentence in the essay. The solution to the issue is to take enough breaks while checking an essay for issues related to tenses.
Articles
The most commonly used articles in the English language are “a”, “an” and “the”. In some rare cases, we can also use “some” as an article. However, these four articles can create a lot of confusion. Most of the time, students make mistakes with the articles while writing an essay in haste. To avoid article mistakes, the only thing students need to do is keep in mind the basic rule of using articles while using them and proofreading without haste.
Wrong Word Usage
When two similar-sounding and spelling words are confused for one another, it becomes wrong word usage. For instance, “expect” and “accept” are similar sounding words and often used wrongly. Furthermore, “breath” and “breadth” are examples of two similar spelling words that are often confusing. Such words are a classic example of wrong word usage. Most of the time students identify the wrong word while proofreading. However, in order to avoid any chances of missing such errors while proofreading, one needs to manually check the spelling of every word along and relate it with the context of the sentence.
English Origin
While using any text editor such as Microsoft Word, one needs to ensure that you select the right origin of language. If you are from the United States and the Microsoft Word is set for English (UK), you might see many red underlined words. The reason is that the spellings and usage of words are different in the US and the UK. There are many other origins, such as Australia, India and much more. Therefore, you need to ensure that the language settings are in place.
For more insights on grammar check:
The above-mentioned points are some common checks for proofreading an essay. Sometimes, you can also get help from various online grammar checking tools. These tools provide some basic help with grammar checks. However, if you seek for an expert opinion, the best option is to get help from an essay writing service such as Uniresearchers. The experts over here have a keen eye to grammar and can proofread any essay in no time.
