Let's review the most common sentence errors in the English language. These
are grammatical mistakes that you often see in people's writing. So there are
eight sentences here, and I'll let you have a look at these. You can pause the
video if you like and see if you can spot the mistakes yourself. And then you
can go through and find out what the answers are, what the mistakes are called,
and also a little bit about how you can fix them. So let's go fairly quickly. The
first one reads, "Cindy loves watching the Great British Bake Off ..." This one
should have a period here, and we call this a comma splice.
... Often this is abbreviated to CS. We
need a period here because these are really two separate sentences. The second
one does have a period, but this one ends with a fragment. A fragment sentence
is an incomplete sentence. It cannot stand by itself as a sentence. The third
one joins two separate sentences together with no intervening
punctuation. Right here we should have a period, and because
there's no punctuation in between we call this a fused sentence. We fused two
things together. Often you'll see this as FS. We fuse two things together with no
punctuation in between. A number of these kinds of mistakes are also called
run-on sentences, because the sentence goes on for too long. So you may see that
designation as well. Okay, the fourth one here [goes], "Finicky Watsop's tabloid has been
bought out by a consortium recently of Welsh investors." This word "recently" is in
the wrong place, and we call this a misplaced modifier. So a misplaced
modifier -- there we go. And it should be somewhere else. So you might say "has
recently been bought out." That's what it really goes with. It goes
with the verb, not with the consortium. We can have all sorts of misplaced
modifiers. We can have adjectives or adverbs
in the wrong place, but we can also have entire phrases and clauses. Now, one
particular modifier that's not simply in the wrong place but also kind of badly
attached is called a dangling modifier. It's a phrase -- especially at the
beginning of a sentence -- that's dangling, that's not properly attached. The
implication with the dangling modifier is usually that it's attached to the
wrong thing. So in this case "John" is the subject here. It sounds like John is
smoking and crackling, but this should refer to the flames. And that's why we
have to do some rewriting. Then we get to the next sentence here: "It appears
that an octopus may actually devour a jellyfish and then use their
stingers as a weapon." The word "their" is a pronoun and it doesn't quite agree
with what came before. So we have a jellyfish -- you can see here that a
jellyfish is a singular noun, and this ["their"] is plural. So we call this a shift in
perspective. A shift in perspective can occur both with pronouns and with
verbs. There are quite a few different kinds of shifts in perspective. The
next sentence here ,which deals with a pronoun reference problem -- pronoun
references overlap with shifts in perspective. So they can be a little bit
hard to distinguish. The last two then ... As I've mentioned, this one is a problem
with pronoun reference. And here we have this pronoun "he." Pronouns often
have to refer back to something that came before. The pronoun has to have some
kind of antecedent or some kind of word that came before that it refers back to.
It seems like there is an antecedent: John Donne. But we have this finicky
little rule which says that you cannot have your antecedent in the possessive
case. It should not have an apostrophe + s. Now we have a whole separate page and
some videos about pronoun reference. So you can have a look at
that, but this is the basic error -- that the pronoun doesn't
refer back nicely to something that came before. Then the last one: we start
with "each" and we have this verb "have" and these two things don't line up. So this
should say, "Each has forgotten ..." Then we also have another issue here with
"their," which is plural, but we'll ignore that for now. So "each" is singular and
that's why we should have "has." We call this problem a subject verb
agreement problem. So the subject and the verb don't agree with each other.
... Those are the most common errors to
watch out for and do some exercises on the website to really get at
being able to spot them. And in no time at all you'll get better at avoiding
these in your own writing.