Common Grammatical Mistakes Writers Should Avoid Making

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Date: January 26, 2023

We, humans, are prone to make mistakes. This goes for any professional field, especially writing. Sometimes, even experienced and professional writers make major grammar mistakes. Certainly, it is essential for writers to overcome these mistakes and create flawless and engaging content to impress their readers. 

Grammar mistakes often get overlooked, especially if you proofread the content yourself. It will surely affect the quality of content and annoy your readers. Moreover, writers who often make grammar mistakes fail to inspire their readers. People don’t want to read articles by authors who can’t write flawlessly.

A study done in the UK validates that most people don’t prefer reading blogs or buying products from websites that include bad spelling and grammar mistakes in the content. The blunders in content writing often lead people to doubt the credibility of an online platform. Therefore, writers need to provide readers with content that makes a strong impact on their minds.  

In this blog post, we’ll highlight a few most common grammatical mistakes writers usually make. So, keep on reading this blog to enlighten yourself with common grammar mistakes that you must avoid while creating an article.  

Common Grammar Mistakes Writers Should Avoid

1. Inappropriate Use of Apostrophes and Contractions   

Many writers often get confused when using contractions and apostrophes in the text. For instance, many writers often fail to understand the difference between Your and You’re. Similarly, using their instead of there, or they’re cause errors in the content.  

The following information will help you use these contractions and apostrophes appropriately.  

They’re Vs. There Vs. Their  

• There: It denotes a place away from your current position. For example, “Please go there.”
• Their: It defines something possessed by a group of people. For example, “Parents love their children.” 
• They’re: It refers to a contraction of two words – they and are. For example, “ They’re moving from this city.” 

Your Vs. You’re

• Your define something that belongs to You. For example, “I love your car.” 
• On the other hand, You’re is a contraction of two words _ You and are. For example, “You’re good at sports.” 

2. Massive Use of Passive Voice 

Writing most of your text in a passive voice will make your content unclear and ambiguous for readers. It’s a common problem that many writers make in their articles. Placing the object of a sentence at the start often affects the text’s readability. However, keeping the object after the verb will help increase the understandability of the text. 

It is always suggested by professional writers and instructors to use active voice in their articles to make them appealing and easy to understand by their readers.  

3. Dangling Modifiers 

Another common grammar mistake writers often make in their text is dangling modifiers. It happens when the writer misses the modifier’s intended subject in a sentence. Simply say that a missed word that makes a sentence unclear and complicated to understand is known as Dangling Modifier.  

Example: “While coming to school, a car accident was witnessed.” 

Correction: “While coming to school, he witnessed a car accident.”

Too Vs. To

This grammatical error mainly occurred because of negligence in appropriate proofreading. Most writers know the difference between too and to but often interchange the terms while writing. If you’re not familiar with the difference between these two terms, read the examples shared below.

Too: Too is placed before a verb or a noun to describe an action, recipient, or place. 

For example, “Would you like some fresh lime too?”

To: To is used to describe an adjective in an extreme situation. It also uses instead of as well, and also. 

For example, “I am going to take a bath.”

4. Pronoun Disagreement

Individuals who’re new to content writing usually make this grammar mistake. However, the simple-to-follow rule will help prevent your text from pronoun disagreement. All you need is to use a singular pronoun for sentences with singular nouns and plural pronouns for plural nouns.  

For example: “The boy needs to work hard if they want to succeed in life.” 

Correction: “The boy needs to work hard if he wants to succeed in life.”   

How to Avoid Grammar Mistakes in a Text? 

There are two most useful ways to detect grammatical errors in a text. We will describe both methods in detail. 

● Comprehensive Proofreading

Proofreading is a crucial part of content writing. You cannot ignore this step if you don’t want to compromise on the content quality. Reading the entire text with proper attention will enable you to find any grammar or misspelled errors in the content. However, there is a possibility that you overlook the mistakes in the text you have written yourself. In this regard, you can ask your friends or colleagues to proofread your content to ensure there are no grammatical or style mistakes in the writing.

● Utilize Technology to Prevent Grammar Errors 

The assistance of modern facilities can help individuals easily find grammar mistakes in their text. These tools comprehensively check for grammar and style mistakes in the text and offered useful suggestions to fix those errors immediately. Following this practice, you can save ample time and get reliable grammar checking results in no time.

Final Words:

In the above content, we discussed the mistakes writers often make while writing content. You can counter these errors in your writing by following the suggestions shared in this blog post. Being a writer, you need to strive hard to improve your grammar to create valuable content that can impress your targeted audience. Using modern facilities like an online grammar checker will be a great option to find and remove grammatical errors in your content. I hope this blog post has helped you improve your writing skills.