Even professional writers can drift into passive voice sometimes, and grammar mistakes can damage your credibility. Similarly, clients might pay you less if your work contains grammar errors, and a single error could change the meaning and create confusion.
This might even lead to legal troubles. Moreover, your professional reputation suffers if you keep making these errors, no matter how much you know about your topic. This blog covers 10 common mistakes that even professional writers make and tools that can simplify the editing process.
10 Grammar Mistakes That Even Professionals Make
For being creative, your writing should be error-free, and you must understand grammar rules. Your content can look unprofessional and confuse readers with simple mistakes. These errors might make you unreliable when clients lose faith in your work. These are the 10 most common grammar mistakes:
1. Subject-Verb Agreement Errors
According to the basic rule, subjects and verbs in a sentence must match in number: singular subjects need singular verbs, and plural subjects need plural verbs. This rule seems simple, but gets complicated in complex sentences. For example:
- Correct: The book is on the table. (singular subject, singular verb)
- Correct: The books are on the table. (plural subject, plural verb)
- Incorrect: The stack of books are heavy. (singular subject "stack" with plural verb)
Therefore, thousands of professionals rely on tools like grammar checker to find these errors. It is designed to identify and correct grammatical, spelling, punctuation, and stylistic errors, saving you hours.
2. Tense Inconsistency
Writers switch between different verb tenses (past, present, future) without reason, and that's what we call tense inconsistency. These random shifts can confuse readers by jumping between timeframes.
Writing experts point out that these errors "often occur when writers change their minds halfway through writing the sentence, or when they come back and make changes but only end up changing half the sentence."
Let's look at this sentence with a problematic tense: Sarah completed her assignment, took the bus and went to the market. The verbs jump from past tense (completed), to present (takes), then back to past (went). Readers can't figure out when these actions happened. Here's the correct version: Sarah completed her assignment, took the bus and went to the market.
3. Redundancy in Writing
Repetitive and unnecessary words weaken the message. This redundancy expresses the same information multiple times without reason. Your text becomes wordy and less effective, and readers might lose interest quickly. Redundancy shows up in several ways:
- Tautologies: Using different words to say the same thing ("first and foremost")
- Pleonasms: Extra words that add nothing ("end result" when "result" is enough)
- Intensifier redundancy: Extra emphasis that isn't needed ("absolutely essential")
4. Misplaced Modifiers
Misplaced modifiers create some of the most annoying errors in writing. These grammar mishaps often happen, but are not easy to spot in your work. They can dramatically change your intended meaning. This creates confusion as the modifier seems to describe the wrong element in the sentence.
The incorrect positioning of modifiers makes sentences unclear, or illogical scenarios. Let's look at this sentence: "She wore a bicycle helmet on her head that was too large." This sentence suggests the person's head was too large, not the helmet! A clearer version would be: "She wore a bicycle helmet that was too large on her head."
5. Wrong Word Usage (Affect/Effect, Fewer/Less)
Your sentence's meaning changes completely when you use the wrong word. Word confusion errors trip up even experienced writers, especially when you have certain tricky pairs.
This usually happens with homophones (similar-sounding words) or terms that share meanings but have different grammatical functions. These differences matter: using "affect" instead of "effect" can change your message entirely and damage your credibility.
Correct examples:
- The weather affected our plans. (verb)
- The effect of the medication was immediate. (noun)
6. Inconsistent Capitalization
Capitalization errors are easy to spot. This happens with unnecessary capitalization of words or missing capital letters where needed. These mistakes create an impression of carelessness, even when your content delivers value.
Writers create inconsistency by not following standard rules for uppercase and lowercase letters in their text, making it look disjointed and leave readers confused about proper versus common nouns.
Here's an example: "i took a walk in central park and saw a Bald Eagle sitting atop an Elm Tree." This sentence has several capitalization errors that look unprofessional. The correct version reads: "I took a walk in Central Park and saw a bald eagle sitting atop an elm tree."
7. Overuse of Adverbs
Adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs, and many (but not all) end in -ly. Lazy writers reach for adverbs as an easy shortcut instead of finding the perfect verb. This creates wordiness that slows narrative pace
Adverb overuse shows up as:
- Unnecessary modifiers before verbs: "She quickly ran" versus "She sprinted"
- Intensifiers that add no value: "very," "really," "quite," "somewhat"
- Redundant descriptors: "shouted loudly" (shouting is inherently loud)
- Adverbs of degree: "almost," "just," "too," "most"
8. Misuse of Conjunctions
Conjunctions connect language elements, but writers often struggle with these small yet impactful words. Most errors happen because writers lack a clear understanding of how different conjunction types work in sentences.
Writers make these conjunction mistakes frequently:
- Double conjunction errors: Using two conjunctions where one would suffice ("When I reached there then it was raining" should be "When I reached there, it was raining")
- Incorrect correlative pairs: Using "both/as well as" instead of "both/and" ("Both Rama as well as his father are coming" should be "Both Rama and his father are coming")
- Misplaced negatives with "unless": Adding unnecessary negation ("Unless you do not try" should be "Unless you try")
- Comma errors with coordinating conjunctions: Missing commas between independent clauses ("I cooked and he cleaned" should include a comma: "I cooked, and he cleaned")
9. Incorrect Use of Semicolons
Semicolons sit in a confusing space between commas and periods. They are among the most misunderstood punctuation marks. Writers often avoid them completely or use them too much without knowing the rules. Semicolon errors show up in several ways:
- Using semicolons with dependent clauses: "Because cows smell; they offend me" (incorrect)
- Placing semicolons before coordinating conjunctions: "This assignment is extra credit only; but we still need to hand it in" (incorrect)
- Connecting unrelated independent clauses: "I had spaghetti for dinner tonight; Shawshank Redemption is my favorite movie" (incorrect)
- Using semicolons instead of colons to introduce lists: "The dish has three main ingredients; potatoes, onions and cream" (incorrect)
- Creating comma splices: "The cow is brown, it is also old" (should use a semicolon instead)
10. Misuse of Quotation Marks
Quotation marks look simple to use, but they are one of the most misused punctuation marks in English writing. These punctuation marks serve to show direct speech, quote someone's exact words, and highlight titles of short works.
However, the misuse happens when writers apply them incorrectly or place them wrongly with other punctuation marks.Writers make these quotation mark mistakes consistently:
- Using quotes for emphasis: "Our fish is the 'freshest' in town!" This suggests sarcasm about freshness instead.
- Adding quotation marks to reported speech: Jim said you would "know her." (Incorrect when not his exact words)
- Inconsistent quote styles: Mixing "smart" and "straight" quotation marks within the same document
