Fine-Tuning Your Papers: Part I

1. Compound words

Lots of you are missing compound words:

Correct (Incorrect):

• Yourself/yourselves (not your self/your selves)
• Itself (not it self)
• Herself (not her self)
• Outside (not out side)
• Backpack (not back pack)
• Sidewalk (not side walk)

The best way to remember these is to memorize the ones you miss. The best long-term solution is to read a lot. By reading, you’re exposed to lots of new words and your eye and brain will begin to recognize them automatically.


2. When working with dialog or any kind of quoted material, periods and commas go inside the quotation marks.

Correct: “Make yourselves at home,” she told us.
Incorrect: “Make yourselves at home”, she told us.

Correct: I took a deep breath and tried to restart my “computer.”
Incorrect: I took a deep breath and tried to restart my “computer”.

3. Sentence fragments

Every sentence must have (at the very least) a subject and a verb:

The subject is the person, place, or thing that the sentence is about.
The verb is the action that the subject is performing.
The predicate is the part of a sentence containing a verb and stating something about the subject.

The Wizard incanted.
The Wizard incanted a spell with his wand.

In both of these examples "Wizard" is the sentence’s subject and “incanted” is the verb. Everything else is the predicate.

Let’s imagine that you wrote: “The Wizard incanted. A spell.”

“The Wizard incanted” is a complete sentence, with subject and verb. But “A spell” is a fragment, because it has no verb and may or may not have a subject (we can’t tell if “spell” is the subject or not).

Many creative writers use fragments in creative writing, to sound bold and punchy. But when writing academic essays, you should avoid fragments.


4. The evils of comma splices rear their ugly heads!

A comma splice is an error created when two independent clauses—essentially, two complete sentences—are joined (incorrectly) by a comma instead of a connecting word.

In doing this, the writer tries to use the comma as a kind of end punctuation—which doesn’t work, because a comma can never be used to end a sentence. (That privilege is reserved for periods, question marks, and exclamation marks.)

(Note: splices can also result from trying to use a comma to join a sentence and a fragment, or two fragments. In this case, you have to fix the fragments first, and then fix the comma splice.)

There are two ways to fix a comma splice. The easiest way is to replace the comma with a period:

[INCORRECT] I arrived home at dinnertime, I was hungry.

[CORRECT] I arrived home at dinnertime. I was hungry.

The other way is to insert the word ‘and,’ a coordinating conjunction that changes the two sentences into a single, compound sentence:

[INCORRECT] I arrived home at dinnertime, I was hungry.

[CORRECT] I arrived home at dinnertime, and I was hungry.

Another example:

[INCORRECT] I spent all weekend writing my essay, I was
exhausted by the time it was done.

[CORRECT] I spent all weekend writing my essay.
I was exhausted by the time it was done.

[CORRECT] I spent all weekend writing my essay
and I was exhausted by the time it was done.

5. Subject-verb agreement.

If you have a singular subject, your pronouns and verbs must also be singular.
If you have a plural subject, your pronouns and verbs must also be plural.

For example:

• INCORRECT: Verbs has to agree with their subjects. (plural subject (“verbs”), singular verb (“has”) (Doesn’t work!)

• CORRECT: Verbs have to agree with their subjects. (plural subject (“verbs”), plural verb (“have”) (Success!)

The easiest way to find these sorts of errors is by reading your work aloud.


6. Use possessives correctly.

Use an apostrophe to show ownership:

The boy’s coat (the coat belonging to one boy)

The boys’ coats (the coats belonging to two or more boys)

7. Underline or italicize book, film, magazine, newspaper, and television show titles if used in your essays:

Harry the Potter and the Deathly Hallows
No Country for Old Men
The Portland Oregonian

If using story or poem titles, enclose the title in quotation marks but don’t underline or italicize:

“The Will of Albus Dumbledore”
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

8. As we discussed in class, always use the serial comma, e.g.:

CORRECT: He eats, shoots, and leaves.

INCORRECT: He eats, shoots and leaves.

9. Watch your verb tense!

You can’t start writing in present tense and then suddenly switch to past. The best way to make sure you don’t accidentally switch is to read your work out loud; it’s quite easy to hear any errors this way.


10. When using numbers in your writing, write out the small numbers rather than using ordinals, e.g.:

CORRECT: Eight o’clock, two buses, etc.

INCORRECT: 8 o’clock, 2 buses, etc.

Use ordinal numbers when that's the simplest way to express big or complex numbers. Write big numbers out when it’s simpler to do that:

SIMPLEST: 1624, two million

CUMBERSOME: one thousand six hundred twenty four, 2,000,000

11. Never begin a sentence with an ordinal number or an acronym.

CORRECT: Portland State University has an excellent writing program.

INCORRECT: PSU has an excellent writing program.