By admin 9 December 2017
Common Grammar Mistakes Chomping Your Marks
Students make a number of grammatical mistakes in the English language. Here in this blog, we are discussing a few common mistakes that will help you improve your grammar and language skills.
English language section of various competitive exams like SSC/SBI PO troubles students across India because the language is not native to our students and is taught only when they enter the school. However, with globalization reaching every aspect of the life we need students having a good command over spoken English and written English for a lot many purposes.
Let’s start with a few common grammatical mistakes that students make more than often:
Tenses:
Most students lack grip on the tenses and so end up using wrong forms of the verb and eventually lose marks. Following is the simple method to understand the basic tense chart. Following the chart and making regular reading your habit should help you fix this problem to a great extent.
Subject-Verb Disagreement
It is important to learn that in a sentence; the subject and its associated verb should agree with each other. It means, the student needs to pay close attention to the subject and if it is singular it should have a singular verb and vice versa.
For instance:
Incorrect: The efforts of the dog to reach the meat bowl was in vain.
Correct: The efforts of the dog to reach the meat bowl were in vain.
Explanation: The subject seems to be the ‘Dog” but in actual the subject is the ‘efforts’, which is plural. That means the verb here should be plural, hence ‘were’ instead of ‘was’.
Run-on Sentences and Comma Splices:
The two very common grammatical errors that go hand in hand are the run-on sentences and comma splices. When you are connecting two or more independent clauses, you need a coordinating conjunction like – for, but, yet, and, so, nor, etc. but if you miss on the connecting punctuation like a comma, it is called the run-on sentence. Similarly, when you use a punctuation to join two or more independent clauses but miss a coordinating conjunction, it becomes a comma splice.
Example:
Incorrect: I love pottery and I have enough time to devote but the exhibition deadline is keeping me stressed.
This example has 3 independent clauses:
- I love pottery
- I have enough time to devote
- The exhibition deadline is keeping me stressed
For correcting this incorrect sentence, we need to put commas as shown here:
Correct: I love pottery, and I have enough time to devote, but the exhibition deadline is keeping me stressed.
Comma Misuse
Comma, a varied punctuation mark of all, has multiple uses i.e. there is ‘N’ number of ways they can be used, hence call for more number of mistakes. One out-of-place comma can change the meaning of the sentence.
Example:
Incorrect: Let’s go, Delphi.
Correct: Let’s go Delphi.
Spelling Mistakes
We often pay utmost attention to spellings in writing but still, these are frequently occurring mistakes, the reason being – Digitization. We spend a lot of time on laptops, smartphones that have auto-text features for checking and suggesting the spellings and the words. Hence, these days we put very little effort in remembering and typing correct spellings. That’s why we don’t know correct spellings of the words if we are to write without the help of these electronic gadgets.
Also, these gadgets use U.S. English and our education system is based on U.K. English and both these variations of English have slightly different spellings for some words.
Example:
U.S English – Organization
U.K English – Organisation
Redundant words
Redundant words are not really a grammatical error; however, these can make your writing look amateurish and less polished. In order to fill up their sheets, students in India often write more words than necessary. Answers should be to-the-point and crisp, which can happen when they stop using redundant words and practice using single words for longer phrases as well as stio repeating the same point in different words.
Example:
Add up – ‘up’ here is a redundant word, adding nothing to the meaning.
Advance planning/warning/reservation – Using ‘advance’ is superfluous.
Correct English is important to score well in exams and extremely important if you are appearing for competitive exams like SBI PO, SSC, etc. Hence, for polishing your grammar skills enrol for online SBI PO/SSC coaching today. Joining online courses saves your time also. For details, visit http://online.vidyaguru.in/sbi-coaching/.