Common Article Writing Mistakes to Avoid
- Spelling mistakes: the mobile culture has brought to light the changes in spellings. For example, writing “u” instead of “you”. While writing a formal article, you need to spell words accurately and correctly.
- Grammatical mistakes: Many students do not pay attention to the grammatical correctness of their sentences. They use “it’s”, “its”, “your” “you’re” interchangeably, thus changing the meaning of what they want to convey.
- Another grammatical mistake that is commonly seen is the change in voice. “people drink more apple juice” changes to “apple juice is drunk more by people”. The article starts off in active voice and somewhere in between slips into passive voice and then comes back to active voice. Maintain consistency. Reading a text with frequently changing voice is not smooth.
- Punctuation errors: Punctuation like commas, full stops, quotes and apostrophes are important if you want your audience to read your articles easily. For instance, “Capture not, set free” is totally different from “Capture, not set free” just depending on the position of the comma. So take care of your punctuation.
- Long Paragraphs: The attention span of the reader is low. It is rare to find someone who will read your article word for word. So if you want to succeed in getting the reader to read or in the least, scan your article, you must make it easy for him/her by writing short paragraphs and giving a heading to each paragraph. This is especially true of argumentative and descriptive type of articles.
