portfolio 6

Identify three of your common grammar mistakes and explain how the grammatical structure should be used correctly.

My major weakness in my grammar would most probably be the use of plural or singular form for subjects in a sentence. I tend to overlook such mistakes which can be spotted easily by others. Take an extract from my recent writing assignment as an example,

“However, if we were to look at it from the biological point of view, embryos of less than 14 days old should not be considered a human life yet as they lack parts that clearly define its possibility of turning into a human being. ”

I am actually quite surprised that I totally overlooked the gross error in the inconsistency of using plural or singular subject. We should always be consistent in the form of subject throughout our sentences, either we stick to the singular form or we change everything to plural form. Here is what I have changed the above sentence to,

“However, if we were to look at this issue from the biological point of view, an embryo of less than 14 days old should not be considered as a human life yet as it lacks parts that clearly define its possibility of turning into a human being.”

The second grammatical error that I usually make is writing non-parallel sentence. It is acceptable if you want to present several ideas together in one sentence, but you have to make sure that the ideas are parallel to each other. For example,

“From the pro-life advocates and religious point of view,....”

The term “Pro-life advocates” is a noun while “religious” is an adjective. We should keep everything to either noun or adjective term. Here are two examples,

“From the pro-life advocates and devotees to certain religions point of view,....”
Or
“From the pro-life and religious point of view,....”

Lastly, I tend to smash several important ideas together in one sentence. Below is another example from my writing assignment draft2,

“ACSR should not be used to replace ESCR since adult cells are not pluripotent and lastly, despite a number of failures, ESCR should continue as its success would certainly be of significant value to the medical field.”

If we were to group ideas together in one sentence, it may devalue the importance of those ideas that you want to bring across. This is particularly important when you are writing argumentative essays.

To conclude, such simple mistakes can be very irritating to the readers. Especially when these errors appear in our reports, the reader might think that we did not even put in the effort to check through our work for simple grammatical errors. Therefore, we should all be mindful of our grammar and improve on our language together!