Most Common Writing Errors ✔️

Grammar

This chapter will cover basic grammar tips.

There's an intro breaking down bad grammar, but there are sections as well.

1) English Is Not Your Native Language

2) How I Judge Grammar

3) Their There + They're

4) General Tips + Common Errors I See

5) How To Use Resources To Improve

I'm gonna say something that will make people mad. I'm sorry in advance, it's a hard pill to swallow.

There are no excuses for terrible grammar in 2023.

Before you boo me, I want you to take a close look at all the hundreds of free grammar software available for you to use, then tell me why you don't use them.

I'm the last person to advocate for Grammarly, I think it's terrible for creative writing, but it does help with grammar.

Along with that, there are countless resources you can use. There are thousands of editing shops on Wattpad where someone can help you edit, or a co-author to help you if you struggle with word order and vocabulary, or review shops to help point you in the right direction, etc. You can also study in a fun way by watching YouTube videos. I'll explain more in the fifth section of this chapter.

Another thing is I know so many authors who don't proofread or edit their work. At least give it a read over if you're not going to edit it, it'll cut out so many grammar and spelling mistakes.

For terrible grammar, the only excuse I somewhat accept is age. If someone is young, they may not know as much about the grammar editing software available as other people do.

Whether you're a native English speaker or not, it doesn't matter. You can use grammar editing software and other resources to at least make your grammar readable.

When I say terrible grammar, I mean unreadable stories. I mean stories that have no punctuation, don't have any sense of capitalization, mess up word order, constant misspellings, etc. I mean all of these issues combined, not just one or two of them, but stories with countless grammar errors at the same time.

It's one thing to have a lot of grammar errors and another thing entirely to have an unreadable story. For example, if an author has capitalization issues, dialogue tag issues, tense issues, and messes up some words like then and than and their/they're/there, I still consider the story readable because, even when combined, those issues are still readable. They're more minor issues when it comes to determining if a story is readable or not.

But when someone has word order issues, tense issues, no punctuation, consistent misspellings, capitalization issues, and more, that's what I consider unreadable. Heavy on punctuation and word order issues because if you get those wrong, there's a high chance the reader will have no clue what the sentence is saying.

I judge for many award contests. There have been times I've felt bad for scoring authors lowly in categories such as emotion, characters, and pacing because there wasn't anything necessarily wrong with those categories: the issue was the grammar.

When you can't read the story, you can't figure out if the emotions, characters, and pacing is good or not. That's why I suggest using grammar software, that way the execution of the story is stronger.

Whether or not you use grammar software doesn't change that misspellings and grammar errors will, of course, slip through.

Hell, my entire job is technical writing, which means I have to have near-perfect grammar and spelling if I want to keep my job. Still, for my fanfics especially, I make mistakes that make me facepalm when I reread my works.