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Impeccable writing skills are the desire of most college-bound students. Even though practice makes perfect, the process of trial and error is a frustrating way to learn the rules of the English language. Awareness of the following common errors will help you pinpoint and correct your bad habits, as well as improve the quality of your writing.

1. Tenses. It is easy to slip from one tense to another when writing. Think about this during reviewing/revising, and make sure your tenses are consistent. Use past tense for essays regarding history and future tense for proposals. Use present tense is most essays; it evokes your active voice, which engages the reader.
2. Prepositions. Become familiar with common prepositions, and do not use them at the ends of sentences. It is fine to close with a preposition in conversation, but do not do so in writing. Rather than “This is what I’m most proud of,” you should write “I am most proud of this.”
3. Thesaurus use. It is tempting to spruce up a writing assignment with highfalutin words. If the thesaurus says it is interchangeable with your original word choice, it must be so, right? Wrong! Often a thesaurus will list related words that have similar, but not identical, meanings. If you don’t recognize a word, look it up in the dictionary to make sure it works before committing to its use.
4. Complete sentences. All sentences must include a subject and a predicate. The subject identifies your topic, and the predicate includes a verb expressing the action. Sentence fragments exclude either the subject or verb, thereby affecting the flow and understandability of your essay. Using single-word sentences for emphasis is okay in certain creative writing instances, but be frugal with them.
5. Commas. Learn the proper uses of commas. According to Lynne Truss’s best-seller Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, the following area few of the proper uses for commas.
   1. Use commas for listing,
   2. Use commas to set off interjections,
   3. Use commas before conjunctions to join compound sentences, and
   4. Use commas before direct quotes.

Learning when and where to place commas will help you avoid excessive comma usage.

For additional information, check out Woe is I by Patricia T. O’Conner or The Deluxe Transitive Vampire by Karen Elizabeth Gordon. These engaging and witty reads will help you master the finer points of punctuation and grammar.