Grammar for Non-Majors

Students frequently point out to me that they are not English majors, so they don’t need to write well. They claim that the world of business and/or education and/or science doesn’t require much writing and will tolerate a great amount of error or non-standard usage and grammar.

They are wrong.

If these students ever want to move up from stacking boxes in the warehouse (their current involvement in the world of big business) to being part of a management team, they must look and sound like educated people, and their toughest audience is the people who will hire them.

Welcome to the real world

Grammar is not random, nor is it impossible. In fact, a relatively small number of errors come around repeatedly, so if you can identify your own problem areas (use the markings you receive on your papers as a guide), you can make a course of study for yourself.

You will see two lists below. The first list is an educators’ list based on problems found in college student essays. The second list comes from professionals who are not educators, and it shows which errors they find most annoying. Your best strategy for improving your grammar and usage is to:

1. Copy both lists and begin keeping a tally of your own errors. You want to pay attention to the problems you have most frequently.
2. Use the Capital Community College Foundation grammar page or the GrammarBook.com grammar rules page to figure out how to deal with your most frequent problems.
3. Ask for help at the Ashland University Writing and Communication Center.
4. When you proofread any of your papers (not just the ones for English class), pay special attention to the problems you found in your tally of your own errors.

The Educators’ List

Spelling errors were the most frequent (and the most easily fixed). Modern word processors often fix things automatically, but you need to reread your copy to make sure they did their work correctly—and if a word has a wavy red underline, don’t ignore it. That word needs your attention. Homonyms/Homophones (sound-alike words) are a special problem because the spelling checker won’t show you that you made a mistake.

Here are the remaining errors, in order of frequency from a large sample of student papers (Public Schools of North Carolina). If you master these issues, you have probably dealt with 90% of the grammar you need:

1. No comma after an introductory element
2. Vague pronoun reference
3. No comma in compound sentence
4. Wrong word
5. No comma in nonrestrictive element
6. Wrong/missing inflected endings
7. Wrong or missing preposition
8. Comma splice
9. Possessive apostrophe error
10. Tense shift
11. Unnecessary shift in person
12. Sentence fragment
13. Wrong tense or verb form
14. Subject-verb agreement
15. Lack of comma in series
16. Pronoun agreement error
17. Unnecessary comma with restrictive element
18. Run-on or fused sentence
19. Dangling or misplaced modifier
20. Its/It’s error

The Non-Educators’ List

We continually pass judgment on our fellow humans, and their speech/writing give us our most important data. When John Updike’s short story "A&P" opens, the speaker says, "In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits," and we know immediately that the speaker is probably young and certainly uneducated. We need nothing more than the subject/verb agreement problem to show us that the speaker, a grocery store cashier, wouldn’t be very impressive if he applied for the manager’s job.

The following section is quoted from Linda Aragoni’s website.

In 1981, researcher Maxine Hairston set out to discover what kinds of errors in writing and speaking professional people regarded as most serious. Hairston sent out 101 surveys consisting of 65 sentences containing a grammatical error. She grouped errors into five categories according to how serious the 84 respondents considered them to be.

Hairston’s respondents were most upset by a class of errors she called status marking errors. Such errors may not prevent writers and speakers from being understood, but they mark people who use them as poorly educated, low income, and low social status.

Professionals had a very negative reaction to types of errors which teachers may not target for remediation—errors that don’t appear as items on standardized tests and may not appear in students’ writing. The errors do, however, appear often in speech.¹

Examples of status-marking errors that caused Hairston’s respondents to wince are:

• He brung his cell phone to class.
• If I had went to class, I wouldn’t have failed.
• We was in the cafeteria.
• He don’t like it when I wear my pants down low.
• I didn’t do nothing.
• Him and me were just sitting there.²

Here is an analysis of Hairston’s work, from the North Carolina website.

The professionals indicated the degree to which the error bothered them and Hairston classified them into groups from the most serious to the least serious in these people’s estimations. Those responding reacted very strongly to the group of errors marked "Status Marking" and less strongly toward those classed as "Very Serious," "Serious," "Moderately Serious," and "Minor or Unimportant."

STATUS MARKING

• Nonstandard verb forms in past or past participle: brung instead of brought; had went instead of had gone
• Lack of subject-verb agreement: We was instead of We were; "Jones don’t think it’s acceptable" instead of "Jones doesn’t think it is acceptable"
• Double negatives: "I don’t want no more coffee." instead of "I don’t want any more coffee."
• Objective pronoun as the subject: "Him and Richard were the last ones hired" instead of "He and Richard were the last ones hired."

VERY SERIOUS

• Sentence fragments
• Run-on sentences
• Non-capitalization of proper nouns
• Would of instead of Would have
• Lack of subject-verb agreement (non-status marking)
• Insertion of comma between the verb and its complement
• Non-parallelism
• Faulty adverb forms: "He treats his men bad"
• Use of transitive verb set for intransitive sit

SERIOUS

• Predication errors: "The policy intimidates hiring."
• Dangling modifiers
• I as an objective pronoun: "George gave the book to Sam and I."
• Lack of commas to set off interrupters like however
• Lack of commas in a series
• Tense switching: "We were driving down the road, when suddenly a cement truck runs a stop sign and hits us."
• Use of a plural modifier with a singular noun: "These kind of errors"

MODERATELY SERIOUS

• Lack of possessive form before a gerund
• Lack of commas to set off an appositive
• Inappropriate use of quotation marks
• Lack of subjunctive mood
• Writing "That is her across the street"
• Use of whoever instead of whomever
• Use of the construction "The situation is … when"
• Failure to distinguish between among and between
• Comma splices

MINOR OR UNIMPORTANT

• Use of a qualifier before Unique: That is the most unique city
• Writing different than instead of different from
• Use of a singular verb with data
• Use of a colon after a linking verb: "Three causes of inflation are:"
• Omission of the apostrophe in the contraction it’s

1. I disagree with Aragoni: many of my students see writing as simply a recording of their speech patterns, so these errors often show up in student essays. You will notice that most of the errors focus on non-standard verb usage. The would of versus would have problem is another place where students get in trouble by simply recording their speech sounds. I also see this when students "write with an accent," for example writing "I fill good" instead of "I feel good."
2. In my experience, writers and speakers who use object forms for compound subjects ("Him and me") do two other things that really irritate professional readers: They open with the first person instead of putting the first person last in the list, and they use a singular verb with a compound subject, so the supremely annoying sentence (wrong on three counts) usually comes out as "Me and him was just sitting there." That just screams "I’m low-status and uneducated" to most professional readers. (By the way, the correct form would be "He and I were just sitting there.")

Aragoni, Linda. "Essential Grammar According to Research Studies." You Can Teach Writing, 31 Dec. 2010, www.you-can-teach-writing.com/essential-grammar.html. Accessed 11 Aug. 2011.

Public Schools of North Carolina State Board of Education. "English Language Arts Resources: In the Right Direction." NC Standard Course of Study, www.dpi.state.nc.us/curriculum/languagearts/secondary/rightdirection3/005research?&print=true. Accessed 11 Aug. 2011.