Journal #4 - What is good writing?

This resource was a great tool, as I haven noticed many of these mistakes in my writing and even in other peoples writing during peer editing. Often many of the errors that were listed are things that we commonly do and don’t even realize until we re-read over our paper or until the teacher points out the error. After looking at this website and the paper I just wrote for this class I began looking to see what I may need to change. The errors I have the most difficulty with are sentence fragments, comma splices, superfluous commas, and unclear pronoun reference. These all make my writing appear weak when in reality once these things are changed my writing looks much better. I think I am prone to sentence fragments because often when I am writing I tend to think of ideas and write what comes to mind and when I re-read through my paper I am not careful enough to change these errors. With comma splices I often end my thoughts and try to combine ideas adding conjunctions and commas when in reality this is an incorrect error and I need to shorten my sentences and just make some of my ideas into multiple sentences as opposed to one long sentence with many commas. This leads to my next error, which is that I often have superfluous commas and in sentences I tend to add commas much more often than they are needed. Lastly with unclear pronoun references, I don’t realize that I didn’t mention the person I am talking about before I start saying he, she, etc. This can be a big problem especially in research papers as it makes me sound very unknowledgeable when this often isn’t the case. In this paper that I just wrote, I am going to try to be more aware of all these mistakes to make my paper sound better and so I don’t get marked off for silly grammar mistakes that I should have recognized.