How Do You Read For Punctuation And Grammar Mistakes?
• Learn what punctuation and grammatical errors you make most often. Have someone else proofread and edit several samples of your writing, noting your errors. • Read your writing aloud. Do it slowly and carefully so you pick up the sounds of your words. Mistakes you may miss when you see them, you may pick up when you hear them. • Examine your work, sentence by sentence, last sentence to first. Reading your work from the end to the beginning forces you to see whether or not a sentence logically follows the one before it and makes grammar and punctuation mistakes stand out more. Consult a dictionary. Look up words whose spelling or meaning you’re unsure of, as well as the tenses and irregular forms of verbs. • End each sentence with a period. This also means knowing when to end a sentence, instead of creating a run-on sentence. • A comma splice run-on sentence uses a comma to separate two independent clauses, as in “I played chess, the boy watched.” Replace the comma with a semicolon, p
