The Top Ten Student Essay Writing Errors, by Jessica Tiffin

Jessica Tiffin wrote out these excellent pointers for students in their essay writing techniques and skills. Jessica graphically shows the right and wrong approach. Follow Jessicas introduction and go to her example page...

"I spend a lot of time marking essays and writing comments, and a large proportion of that time and effort is spent on grammatical and stylistic errors. I keep threatening to have rubber stamps made for the more common ones, which underlines the sad fact that an awful lot of these errors are common to an awful lot of students.

"This checklist, then, is an attempt to proactively treat your essay: if you look through this list and make a serious effort to avoid the errors it contains, I'll have a lot more time to look at the content of your work, your argument and insight, rather than mechanistic mistakes. This will not only make me a lot happier, it will also give you a better chance to improve your essay-writing. It will also improve your mark: you are penalised for grammatical errors in an English essay. Writing correct English makes everyone happier, especially you. And you can feel the warm glow of pride which says you are not part of that awful horde of students whose abuse of the innocent apostrophe is hastening my decline...

1. Poor page layout and paragraphing.
2. Plagiarism.
3. Incorrect referencing.
4. Contractions, abbreviations and slang.
5. Incomplete sentences.
6. Spelling errors and word misuse.
7. Unformatted titles.
8. Incorrect use of apostrophes.
9. its/it's
10. "that of"