I would be grateful if you could help me to correct errors you may find in the text below, in terms of commas, vocabulary, conciseness, among others.Thanks before hand!
Most of the times, when we are asked to create a piece of writing, we are not aware of the errors in the organization of the text, what can negatively affects the coherence or give rise to multiple interpretations of the ideas we intended to express.
Dangling modifiers are words, phrases or sentences that intend to add a description to modify the subject of the main clause, but fail to refer logically to the actor.
They are errors caused by failing to use the word that the modifier is meant to refer.
For example, in the sentence “Having seen Blackpool Tower, the Eiffel Tower is more impressive”, the modifier “having seen Blackpool Tower” should refer to the actor in the main clause, but in terms of logic, the Eiffel Tower cannot be, so the sentence gets difficult to understand.
This sentence “At the age of eight, my family finally bought a dog” can also be confusing since the modifier “at the age of eight” grammatically refers to the family, but logically should refer to a member of the family whose age was eight when they bought a dog.
For some people, these type of errors may be unobtrusive, but for more critical readers these errors affect the coherence, so in order to repair them, it is necessary to change the subject of the independent clause so that it names the actor implied by the modifier, as in this example “Having seen Blackpool Tower, she thinks the Eiffel Tower is more impressive”, or turn the modifier into a word group that names the actor, as in this case “When I was eight, my family finally bought a dog”.
Secondly, we learnt about commas, which are one of the most common punctuation marks that can be used either when a pause is needed in a sentence or to clarify meaning.
A comma can be used in several situation, for instance in compound sentences where the comma is placed before the coordinating conjunction, as in the following example “Mary did her homework, and Valerie played the piano”.
Another instance in which commas can be placed is in between an introductory sentence, that is a dependant clause, and an independent clause, as in the next example “Before the movie began, we went to buy some sweets”.
Another use of the comma is when a sentence contains nonessential information, that has to be placed between commas, as in this sentence “My best friend, who is a lawyer, wants to go to India”.
The last use of commas that we covered in class is when we want to list three or more items, so we should use the Oxford comma or serial comma, which is placed before the coordinating conjunction (and, or, nor) in order to avoid confusion, as in the following example “Last year, Gabriela went to Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, Germany, and Britain”.
Along the course, we learnt about other common errors such as the ones related to misplaced modifiers, conciseness, subject-verb agreement, pronoun agreement, which definitely will help us in our writing process to think critically, monitor, check, and edit our own errors for the sake of improve in this crucial skill, named writing.
December 2015
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