Category: Level 3 pages

There are many, many rules governing how writers may use commas. Paranoid from red marks on their papers, some writers end up using commas wherever possible to avoid getting marked for mistakes. You should...

Some teachers blame text messaging for capitalization errors in student writing. After all, how many times have you written out a quick text message, not worrying about where you need to capitalize? You, like...

Have you ever had a teacher say, “That sentence starts one way and ends another”? If you have, don’t feel bad. Others make this same mistake all the time. Sometimes, we simply lose our...

You want to be sure that you are always consistent with your verb tense. When you shift verb tenses for no reason, and this is an easy mistake to make, you can really confuse...

When you join two independent clauses (complete sentences) with a coordinating conjunction (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, or so—also known as the FANBOYS), you must place a comma before the coordinating conjunction. The...

Apostrophes give many writers a lot of trouble. Sometimes, you might be tempted to put an apostrophe where it does not belong, such as when you are simply making a word plural. Other times,...

A run-on sentence is sometimes called a fused sentence. The concept is simple. If your teacher marks fused sentence or run-on on your paper, it’s because you have put two complete thoughts or independent...

Comma splices live in the same neighborhood as run-on sentences. Often, when a writer attempts to break up a run-on sentence using only a comma, they end up creating a comma splice. A comma...

Pronoun agreement can be trickier than it might seem on the surface. The rule is that we must make sure our pronouns agree in number and gender with the nouns they are replacing. For...