The English Department of Dalton State College has developed a classification of grammatical and mechanical errors according to the seriousness of each error: Type I errors are the most serious, Type II are of second rank, and Type III errors are the least serious.
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Type I |
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Sentence fragments |
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Fused or run-on sentences |
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Subject-Verb disagreement |
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Comma Splices |
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Type II |
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Pronoun case errors |
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Disagreement of pronoun and antecedent |
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Verb tense sequence errors |
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Shifts in mood, number, person, voice of verbs |
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Dangling or misplaced modifiers |
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Faulty parallelism |
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Ambiguous, broad, and/or vague reference of pronouns |
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Use of second person in formal essay |
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Type III |
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Errors in mechanics |
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Capitalization |
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Italics |
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Abbreviations and numbers |
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Commas |
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Superfluous commas |
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Semicolon |
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Apostrophe |
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Quotation marks |
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Period, question mark, exclamation point, colon, dash, parentheses, brackets |
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Errors in spelling and hyphenation |
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Errors in usage |
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Diction |
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Exactness |
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Wordiness |
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Unity and logical thinking |
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Subordination |
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Separation of related sentence parts, split infinitive |
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Sentence variety |
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Paragraphing |
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Planning and drafting |
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Revising and editing |