Editing a Student's Descriptive Opening
You are editing a Year 10 student's descriptive opening before it is entered for a competition. The draft reads: 'The market opened its gates at six, the smell of bread and diesel filled the air. Stallholders shouted prices, customers haggled over the last boxes of strawberries. Me and my brother was looking for the stall that sold the cracked eggs. Which were cheaper than the supermarket. We had walked for twenty minutes, are feet were aching, but we didn't care.' The competition judges reward clarity, control and stylistic variety, not just correct spelling. The student has asked you to explain the changes rather than simply correct them. The draft contains errors in punctuation, agreement and sentence boundary. You must choose the three most damaging errors to address first, because the student has limited time.
1. Identify three errors that most damage clarity or control, correct them, and explain why each matters.
Read the worked answer
Three high-priority errors:
- Comma splice: 'The market opened its gates at six, the smell of bread and diesel filled the air.' Two independent clauses are joined by a comma. Correct with a full stop or semicolon: 'The market opened its gates at six. The smell of bread and diesel filled the air.' This matters because the splice blurs the sentence boundary and makes the opening feel uncontrolled.
- Subject-verb agreement and pronoun case: 'Me and my brother was looking' should be 'My brother and I were looking.' 'Me' is the object form, but the phrase is the subject; 'was' agrees with a singular subject, but the subject is compound. This matters because the error is conspicuous and undermines the narrator's voice.
- Sentence fragment: 'Which were cheaper than the supermarket.' The relative clause has no main clause. Attach it: '...the stall that sold the cracked eggs, which were cheaper than the supermarket.' This matters because the fragment interrupts the narrative and makes the reader work to reconstruct the meaning.
2. The student wants to keep the sentence 'We had walked for twenty minutes, are feet were aching, but we didn't care.' Rewrite it correctly and explain one further stylistic improvement that would increase control without losing the voice.
Read the worked answer
Corrected sentence: 'We had walked for twenty minutes; our feet were aching, but we didn't care.' This fixes 'are feet' to 'our feet' and replaces the comma splice after 'minutes' with a semicolon, which keeps the three-part rhythm while marking the boundary clearly.
A further stylistic improvement would be to make the last clause more concrete: 'We had walked for twenty minutes; our feet ached, but we stayed.' 'Stayed' shows the choice rather than stating 'didn't care', which is tell rather than show. This keeps the student's plain voice but adds control: the semicolon balances the two opening clauses, and the final verb gives the sentence a specific action. The improvement is stylistic, not just corrective, because it strengthens the link between the aching feet and the narrator's decision to remain.