CLEP College Composition common mistakes
CLEP College Composition · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Treating the two essays as free-response opinion pieces and spending the first ten minutes writing a thesis with no plan, then discovering at minute eighteen that only one body paragraph exists.
Candidates carry over habits from timed high-school essays where length and confidence substitute for structure; the CLEP essays are scored on coherent argument and control of language, so unstructured drafting produces essays that trail off or contradict themselves.
What to do instead
Before writing, spend three to four minutes producing a one-line claim plus two or three supporting reasons and a counterpoint you will address. Write to that skeleton, leaving two minutes at the end to reread for sentence-level errors. Practise this timing on at least three full essays so the planning phase becomes automatic.
Choosing the first answer that sounds grammatical in multiple-choice revision items, without checking whether the revision changes the writer's intended meaning or introduces a new error elsewhere in the sentence.
Revision items are built so that a locally correct fix (for example, repairing a comma splice) creates a global problem (a dangling modifier or a lost causal link). Candidates read the underlined portion in isolation rather than the whole sentence.
What to do instead
Read the entire sentence, then read each option substituted back into the full sentence. Eliminate any option that fixes the flagged issue but breaks agreement, parallelism, or logic elsewhere. Ask of the surviving option: does the sentence still say what the original passage was trying to say?
Confusing revision with proofreading: treating every question as a hunt for a typo and ignoring questions that ask which sentence should be added, deleted, or moved to improve a paragraph.
Many candidates equate 'editing' with spelling and punctuation, so organisational questions feel unfamiliar and they pick the option that sounds most formal rather than the one that improves focus or flow.
What to do instead
Classify each question before answering: is this a sentence-level convention item or a paragraph-level revision item? For paragraph items, identify the paragraph's topic sentence and ask which option serves that topic. Delete options that add interesting but off-topic detail; move options only when the current order breaks a clear time, cause, or general-to-specific sequence.
Punctuating by pause: inserting a comma wherever they would breathe, producing comma splices between independent clauses and commas before every subordinating conjunction.
Spoken rhythm is a reliable guide to some punctuation but not to clause boundaries, and candidates have often been taught 'put a comma where you pause' as a shortcut.
What to do instead
Test each comma by identifying what sits on either side. If both sides are independent clauses, the comma alone is insufficient: use a period, semicolon, or comma plus coordinating conjunction. If the second side cannot stand alone, no comma is needed before a subordinator such as 'because' or 'although'. Drill ten sentences a day, labelling each clause as independent or dependent.
Matching verbs to the nearest noun rather than the actual subject in sentences with intervening phrases, inverted order, or compound subjects joined by 'or'/'nor'.
Proximity attraction is a strong reading habit: the ear locks onto the noun closest to the verb, especially in constructions like 'The list of items on the desk were long'.
What to do instead
Before judging agreement, bracket and delete every prepositional phrase and parenthetical between subject and verb, then read subject and verb together. For 'either...or' and 'nor', apply the nearest-subject rule deliberately. For inverted sentences beginning with 'There' or a prepositional phrase, locate the true subject first.
Assuming a modifying phrase at the start of a sentence automatically describes the subject that follows, producing dangling or misplaced modifiers that read oddly but are not flagged by spellcheck.
Writers know what they meant, so they do not notice that the opening phrase has no logical subject or that it attaches to the wrong noun.
What to do instead
For every sentence beginning with a participial or appositive phrase, ask 'Who or what is doing this action?' and confirm that noun is the grammatical subject immediately after the comma. If it is not, either rewrite the opening phrase as a full clause or move the intended subject to the front.
Treating source material as decoration: quoting a passage to show it was read, without integrating it into the argument or explaining how it supports the claim.
Candidates believe quoting demonstrates engagement with the sources, and under time pressure a dropped-in quotation feels safer than analysis that might be judged wrong.
What to do instead
Use a three-step pattern for every source reference: introduce the source and its relevance, present the quotation or paraphrase, then explain in your own words what it establishes for your argument. If a source sentence could be deleted without weakening your claim, cut it or replace it with analysis.
Paraphrasing a source by swapping a few synonyms while keeping its sentence structure, then presenting the result as the candidate's own wording.
Paraphrase is often taught as 'put it in your own words', which candidates interpret as word substitution rather than restating the idea in a new structure.
What to do instead
Read the source, look away, and write the idea from memory in your own sentence pattern. Then compare: if the original's clause order or distinctive phrasing survives, rewrite again. Always attribute the idea even when no quotation marks are used, and reserve quotation marks strictly for verbatim wording.
Misreading the rhetorical situation in analysis questions: judging a passage as weak because it is informal, or strong because it uses long words, instead of asking what audience and purpose the writer is serving.
Candidates apply a single prestige register to all prose and treat formality as the measure of quality, which leads them to reject effective plain style or to endorse empty grandiloquence.
What to do instead
For each passage, name the writer's purpose, intended audience, and tone before evaluating anything. Then ask whether specific choices (word choice, sentence length, anecdote, statistics) serve that purpose for that audience. An informal passage can be highly effective; judge the fit between choice and situation, not the register itself.
Answering rhetorical analysis questions about what the passage says rather than how it persuades, selecting options that restate content or identify the topic instead of naming a strategy and its effect.
Reading comprehension habits dominate: candidates summarise, and summary options often look correct because they are true statements about the passage.
What to do instead
Before reading the options, write a two-word label for each paragraph's function (for example, 'concede', 'illustrate', 'rebut'). Eliminate any option that merely reports content. Prefer options that name a device or structure and connect it to an effect on the reader, and check that the effect is plausible for the stated audience.