Ten Minutes of Proofreading Under a Marks Grid
Marco is proofreading his portfolio piece, a 700-word report on a school recycling scheme, before submitting. The assessment grid awards up to 8 marks for 'Accuracy' and states that errors obstructing meaning are penalised more heavily than slips of surface punctuation. His draft contains, among others, these four sentences:
- 'Having collected the data, the results were analysed by the committee.'
- 'The amount of students who took part in the survey were disappointing.'
- 'Its important that the conclusion doesn't simply repeat the introduction, it should summarise the findings.'
- 'A new bin system will be wrote into the action plan.' Marco has 10 minutes left. He plans to rewrite sentence 1 entirely in more formal language, to fix the commas in sentence 3, and to add a semicolon somewhere in his conclusion.
1. For each of the four sentences, name the error, give the minimal correction, and rank it high or low priority under this grid. Be explicit about why sentence 2 contains two separate errors.
Read the worked answer
Sentence 1 - dangling participle (high priority). 'Having collected the data' describes the committee, but the sentence makes 'the results' its subject, so the results appear to have collected the data. Minimal fix: 'Having collected the data, the committee analysed the results.'
Sentence 2 - two errors (both high priority).
- Lexical: 'amount' with a countable noun. It should be 'number of students'.
- Grammatical: the head of the subject is 'the number', which is singular, so 'were' must become 'was'. A writer who fixes only the first still has a subject–verb agreement error. Corrected: 'The number of students who took part in the survey was disappointing.'
Sentence 3 - two errors of different weight. The apostrophe in 'Its' is a surface slip (low priority). The comma splice between 'introduction' and 'it should' is a sentence-boundary error (medium-high): it misrepresents two independent clauses as one. Fix: '...doesn't simply repeat the introduction; it should summarise the findings.'
Sentence 4 - wrong verb form (high priority). 'will be wrote' should be 'will be written'; the passive requires the past participle. This is a grammar error, not a typo, and it recurs across a script if it is a habit.
Ranking: 1, 2 and 4 obscure or misstate meaning and signal grammar gaps, so they are fixed first. Sentence 3 splits: fix the splice, and the apostrophe if there is time.
2. Marco intends to spend most of his ten minutes making sentence 1 sound 'more formal' and adding a semicolon to his conclusion. Explain why this is the wrong use of the time, and give him a workable ten-minute routine.
Read the worked answer
Why the plan misfires
- Formalising is not correcting. Rewriting sentence 1 as 'Following the collection of the data, an analysis was undertaken' adds nominalisations and a new agentless passive, and it does not fix the dangling modifier - it hides it. It also introduces fresh risk of error in a sentence that had one clear problem with a three-word fix.
- The semicolon is decorative. It earns nothing under a grid that weights meaning-obstructing errors more heavily, and a semicolon between two clauses that do not contrast will look like decoration to an examiner.
- The commas in sentence 3 are the lesser half of that error. The splice is the problem; commas are not the cure.
Ten-minute routine
- Minutes 1–4: fix sentences 1, 2 and 4 with minimal edits - subject restored, 'number... was', 'written'. Do not rewrite, do not improve vocabulary.
- Minutes 5–6: fix the splice in sentence 3 with a semicolon or a full stop, then the apostrophe.
- Minutes 7–9: read the whole piece backwards, sentence by sentence, looking only for verb forms and subject–verb agreement. Backwards reading defeats the brain's habit of correcting what it expects to see.
- Minute 10: check the two or three errors he knows he repeats. Then stop. Late additions are where new errors come from.