Successful Academic Writing
succeed@writing

Academic writing
Write well
The Common Mistakes
Following a survey of Solent University lecturers, we came up with a list of the most common, and annoying, writing mistakes that students make. If you want to write well, know what the common mistakes are, and avoid them:
Overall
- No clear introduction. What is your point or position? Where is the essay going?
- Poor structure with little or no signposting (linking expressions)
- Generally too descriptive, often with little or no analysis or reference to theory
- Writing in the first person (using 'I', 'me', 'my' or 'mine') or slipping in and out of third and first person
- Poor referencing
- Weak or non-existent topic sentences
- Paragraphs often very short with little development of the main idea
- No supporting evidence or relevant examples
- Incomplete sentences
- Overlong sentences
- Sticking two sentences together with no link
- Incorrect word order
- Poor subject/verb agreement (eg 'they was' instead of 'they were'.)
- Poor verb agreement with collective nouns (eg 'the government were')
- Adding an apostrophe to plurals (It's not needed!)
- Omitting or misplacing the apostrophe for possession (eg the student’s work or the students’ work?)
- Using “it’s” instead of “its” for possessive
- Missing comma after an introductory element
- Missing comma in a series
- Missing comma when combining two independent clauses
- Using quotation marks with block quotes (quotes of three or more lines should be indented with no quotation marks)
- Not understanding the difference between a reference list and a bibliography
Let's now pick up on a couple of those points and look at how to write sentences and paragraphs correctly.