September 8, 2006

The Seven Deadly Sins of Student Writers

By BEN YAGODA

I have been teaching college writing since 1992. The corrections I find myself making on student assignments fall into two general categories. The first concern problems of style — specifically, clarity and grace. So I mark the many places where my students commit wordiness, vagueness, awkwardness, banality, and so on. The other category is mistakes: usages that do not follow the accepted rules of standard English.

From the beginning, it was clear to me that most student

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