Common Mistakes to Watch For

There are so many things to watch for when you're writing that it's hard to think of them all. It's easy to forget to put everything into your sentence. It's also easy to put too much in your sentence. Every writer makes mistakes, but a good writer looks back at his or her writing and corrects the mistakes. In this section, you will learn how to find and correct common writing mistakes like sentence fragments, run-on sentences and comma splices.

Sentence Fragments

Sentence Fragments are thoughts that are not complete. A fragment could be missing a verb or a subject, or it should be a part of another sentence. Fragments do not make sense by themselves. Look at these sentences:

I went to school last night. But I don't like the teacher.

The fragment is underlined. When it comes after the first sentence, you can make sense of it, but if you take the first sentence away, you can't figure out what the sentence means. It makes you ask questions like:

• But what?
• Where is the teacher?

The sentence should look like this:
I went to school last night but I don't like the teacher.

By joining the sentences you answer the questions about the fragment.

Exercise 1

Each set of sentences has a sentence fragment. Join the set of sentences to make one complete sentence.

1. Every weekend we would hound dad to drive us somewhere. But he wouldn't because he drives a lot for his job.

2. By the end of Sunday, we were very suspicious. But no one went into the forest.

3. I don't know what a good life is like. Because I have only a robot.

4. The people who bought our home had a problem with the sale of their house. So they couldn't pay us.