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The Roadrunner's Guide to English: Grammar and Vocabulary

Error Types and Grading Standards

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.

Type I                                                                  

Sentence fragments

Fused or run-on sentences

Subject-Verb disagreement

Comma Splices

 

Type II

Pronoun case errors            

Disagreement of pronoun and antecedent

Verb tense sequence errors

Shifts in mood, number, person, voice of verbs

Dangling or misplaced modifiers     

Faulty parallelism

Ambiguous, broad, and/or vague reference of pronouns

 Use of second person in formal essay

 

Type III

Errors in mechanics

     Capitalization               

     Italics

     Abbreviations and numbers

     Commas

     Superfluous commas

     Semicolon      

     Apostrophe    

     Quotation marks

     Period, question mark, exclamation point, colon, dash,

      parentheses, brackets

 

Errors in spelling and hyphenation 

 

Errors in usage

     Diction

     Exactness        

     Wordiness

     Unity and logical thinking

     Subordination  

     Separation of related sentence parts, split infinitive

     Sentence variety

     Paragraphing  

     Planning and drafting

     Revising and editing      

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

                               

Parts of Speech