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3.1: Introduction

  • Page ID
    6926
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    Error Types and Grading Standards

    The English Department of Dalton State College has developed a classification of grammatical and mechanical errors according to the seriousness of each error: Type I errors are the most serious, Type II are of second rank, and Type III errors are the least serious.

    Type I

    Sentence fragments

    Fused or run-on sentences

    Subject-Verb disagreement

    Comma Splices

    Type II

    Pronoun case errors

    Disagreement of pronoun and antecedent

    Verb tense sequence errors

    Shifts in mood, number, person, voice of verbs

    Dangling or misplaced modifiers

    Faulty parallelism

    Ambiguous, broad, and/or vague reference of pronouns

    Use of second person in formal essay

    Type III

    Errors in mechanics

    • Capitalization
    • Italics
    • Abbreviations and numbers
    • Commas
    • Superfluous commas
    • Semicolon
    • Apostrophe
    • Quotation marks
    • Period, question mark, exclamation point, colon, dash, parentheses, brackets

    Errors in spelling and hyphenation

    Errors in usage

    • Diction
    • Exactness
    • Wordiness
    • Unity and logical thinking
    • Subordination
    • Separation of related sentence parts, split infinitive
    • Sentence variety
    • Paragraphing
    • Planning and drafting
    • Revising and editing

    Parts of Speech


    This page titled 3.1: Introduction is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Jenny Crisp via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.