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Sunday, March 25, 2012

Week 13: Identification of errors

For this week, I would like you all to review your writing assignment.

Use of Spelling and Grammar Checker

Make use of the spelling and grammar checker in Microsoft Word to help you identify errors in your assignment.  Spelling errors will be underlined with a wavy red line while grammar errors are marked with a wavy green line.  If you right-click on these errors, you will see suggestions for spelling correction.  If you select "Grammar", you can see suggestions for grammar correction.  To help you decide on how to correct your errors, you can get some help by clicking on "Explain".  Here, the type of error you have made is identified and some examples are given. 

An example of a common type of error is a sentence fragment.  A sentence fragment is an incomplete sentence.  It can be missing a subject, or it can be missing a verb.  Another possibility is that it begins with a subordinating word  (e.g. although, when, while, before, etc) but it doesn't end with an independent clause.  Such a "sentence" is said to be "hanging" because the idea is not complete. 

For the purpose of our class discussion, you must copy the incorrect sentence and paste it into a new document first before you correct it.  After you have corrected the error in your assignment, again copy the corrected sentence and paste it into the new document on the next line after the incorrect sentence.

We shall discuss the correction of these errors when we have our next face-to-face interaction.  In the meantime, you could also post some of the more challenging errors which you are not sure of and invite your classmates to give you some suggestions.

Happy learning :)

Mdm Lim