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Identifying the Most Common Errors in SSU Student
Writing
In 2006, SSU’s Composition
Oversight Committee was granted a mini-grant from the Assessment
Office to study surface errors in student writing. The
Committee believed that determining the most common errors in
student writing would be helpful to both writing instructors and
writing center tutors because a list of common errors could help
these individuals decide what to focus on when teaching editing and
proofreading skills. The list could also be given to students to
use as a proofreading checklist. Therefore, the Committee
collected and analyzed a representative sample of papers written by
students enrolled in English 096 (now 0096), 111, and 112 (two of
the three composition classes required of SSU students under the
quarter system).
Methods
The Composition Oversight
Committee developed a grid to use for tracking student errors.
Then the Committee read one 112 paper together and charted all of
the errors on the grid. Because some errors that occurred in the
112 paper were not on the original grid, the committee revised the
grid. Then the members of the committee divided up the remaining 74
sample papers (25 from each course). At least two members of the
committee read and analyzed each paper. The readers compared their
analyses to see if they had any discrepancies. When discrepancies
appeared, the readers discussed them and decided how to chart the
errors in question, sometimes bringing in a third reader to be
arbitrator.
Results
The following chart lists all of
the errors in order of frequency. It also compares the ranking
of SSU student error to the results of a national study of student
error conducted by Andrea Lunsford in 2006.
|
Error |
Rank in
SSU Student Writing |
Rank in
Lunsford's "Top 20" (2006 National Study) |
|
Comma error |
1 |
2, 7, 11, 13, |
|
Pronoun error |
2 |
4, 17 |
|
Spelling error (including homophone) |
3 |
5 |
|
Wrong word
|
4 |
1 |
|
Capitalization error |
5 |
8 |
|
Missing word |
6 |
9 |
|
Sentence boundary error |
7 |
15, 16 |
|
Unnecessary words |
8 |
included in 10 |
|
Quotation mark error |
9 |
included in 6 |
|
Unnecessary tense shift |
10 |
12 |
|
Apostrophe error |
11 |
14 |
|
Hyphen error |
12 |
19 |
|
Subject-verb agreement
|
13 |
NA |
|
Idiomatic error |
14 |
included in 1 |
|
Period error |
15 (tie) |
many included in 6 |
|
Subject and object agreement |
15 (tie) |
NA |
|
Verb errors (wrong/missing inflected ending;
wrong/missing auxiliary) |
17 |
NA |
|
Modifier problem |
18 |
NA |
|
Underlining/italicizing error |
19 |
many
included in 6 |
|
Faulty parallelism |
20 |
NA |
|
Semicolon error |
21 |
NA |
|
Other
(including parentheses errors and dash errors) |
22 |
NA |
|
Colon error |
23 (tie) |
NA |
|
Question mark error |
23 (tie) |
some
included in 6 |
|
Double negative |
25 (tie) |
NA |
|
Transposition |
25 (tie) |
NA |
The fact that the Composition
Oversight Committee used slightly different categories than did
Lunsford may account for many of the differences between the two
studies. For example, the Committee decided to group all
sentence boundary errors (comma splices, run-ons, and fragments)
together instead of listing them separately. Had the Committee
kept these three types of sentence boundary errors separate, only
comma splices would have appeared on the Top Ten; run-ons and
fragments would have been numbers 20 and 22 respectively. |
