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Reading, Writing, and . . . Rhetoric

Dartmouth's Institute for Writing and Rhetoric

Is your Dartmouth student's writing improving?

It should be, thanks to the Dartmouth Institute for Writing and Rhetoric (formerly the Writing Program).

Writing has long been one of the foundational skills taught at Dartmouth, as the ability to communicate ideas clearly and persuasively is an essential feature of a liberal arts education. Through the Institute, Dartmouth students are discovering firsthand the connections between evidence-based writing, speech, research, new media, visual rhetoric, and technological innovation.

All incoming students are now required to take a minimum of two writing courses, and advanced courses are available--and popular. Advanced offerings include Writing with Media, The Art of Science Writing, The Written Judicial Opinion, Public Speaking, and Speechwriting.

The first-year writing courses use writing as a means of sharpening the crucial analytical, research, and presentation skills students need to be successful in college. "SAT and AP writing"--the dreaded five-paragraph essay—"is not the kind of writing we ask for in college," says Institute director Christiane Donahue. "We push students to take their writing and other communication skills to new levels."

Along the way, students still struggle with those pesky grammar rules, just as you may have struggled when you were a student. Among the Institute's many online resources (a collection of material for which the Institute receives dozens of requests from around the world) is a list of the twenty most commonly occurring writing errors. These twenty mistakes constitute 91.5 percent of all errors in student texts. See if you can spot the grammatical error in each of the examples below. (Visit the Institute's website for the full list.)

Find the Error (answers below)

  1. After a 1904 fire destroyed Dartmouth Hall the trustees voted to rebuild it in permanent form in brick.
  2. The student and his professor knew that he was in trouble.
  3. Wordsworth spent a good deal of time in the Lake District with his sister Dorothy and the two of them were rarely apart.
  4. The students were very proud of they're presentation.
  5. My sister who reads poetry likes comic books.
  6. The student who I mentioned is sitting over there.
  7. Grammar rules that help clarify meaning are different than rules that merely prescribe a convention.
  8. The young Picasso felt stifled in art school in Spain, he wanted to leave.
  9. The book on the table is her's.
  10. About noon the sky darkened, a breeze sprang up, and a low rumble announces the approaching storm.


Answers

  1. Missing comma after introductory phrases. A comma should be placed after "Hall."
  2. Vague pronoun reference. Who is in trouble? The student? His professor? Some other person? When the pronoun referent is unclear, it's often better to repeat the noun for clarity: "The student and his professor knew that the student was in trouble."
  3. Missing comma in compound sentence. A comma should be placed before the "and."
  4. Wrong word. "They're" is a homonym of the correct word, "their."
  5. No comma in nonrestrictive relative clauses. If you have more than one sister, the sentence is correct: the restrictive clause ("who reads poetry") identifies a specific sister (the one who reads poetry), and therefore does not need commas around it. But if you only have one sister, the clause about poetry becomes a perhaps interesting but nonessential (hence nonrestrictive) detail, and so requires commas.
  6. Wrong/missing inflected ends. "The student" is the object of the clause "who I mentioned," so technically the pronoun should be in the objective case, "whom," not the subjective case, "who." "Inflected ends" are any ending added to a word that changes its grammatical function. Other examples include adding "-ed" to a verb to change its tense, or adding "-s" to make a noun plural.
  7. Wrong/missing preposition. Though both "different than" and "different from" are used widely, "different from" is considered grammatically correct. Because prepositions follow few regular rules in English, they can be extremely difficult for many students to master, especially non-native English speakers. When in doubt, check a handbook.
  8. Comma splice. A comma splice is a comma that erroneously joins two independent clauses. The sample sentence could be corrected by dividing the clauses into two sentences, separating them by a semicolon, or adding a conjunction such as "and" after the comma to make a compound sentence.
  9. Possessive apostrophe error. Nouns need apostrophes to indicate possession, but possessive pronouns such as "hers," "theirs," "its," etc., do not. ("It's" is a contraction of "it is," not the possessive form of "it.")
  10. Tense shift. Inexperienced writers often switch from past to present tense without good reason, which can annoy or, worse, confuse, readers. Correct: "About noon the sky darkened, a breeze sprang up, and a low rumble announced the approaching storm."

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