Edit and proofread your draft.
A Note on Grammar and Spelling Checkers
These tools can be helpful, but don’t rely on them exclusively to catch errors in your text: Spelling checkers cannot catch misspellings that are themselves words, such as to for too. Grammar checkers miss some problems, sometimes give faulty advice for fixing problems, and can flag correct items as wrong. Use these tools as a second line of defense after your own (and, ideally, another reader’s) proofreading and editing efforts.
Three problems commonly appear in essays about remembered events: misused words and expressions, incorrectly punctuated or formatted dialogue, and misused past-perfect verbs. The following guidelines will help you check your essay for these common errors.
Using the Right Word or Expression
The Problem Many familiar sayings and expressions are frequently heard but not often seen in writing, so writers often mistake the expression. Consider the following sentences:
Chock it up to my upbringing, but having several children play butt naked around my feet certainly curved my appetite for parenthood.
The deer was still jerking in its death throws, but for all intensive purposes it was dead.
Within those two sentences are five commonly mangled expressions. To the ear, they may sound right, but in each case the author has heard the expression incorrectly and written down the wrong words.
Note: the expressions should be: chalk it up, buck naked, curbed my appetite, death throes, for all intents and purposes.
The Correction You can find and debug these kinds of errors by following these steps:
- Highlight or circle common expressions of two or more words in your writing project (especially those you’ve heard before but haven’t seen in writing).
- Check each expression in a dictionary or in a list of frequently misused words.
- Consider revising the expression: If you have heard the expression so often that it “sounds right,” it may be a cliché. A fresh expression will be more powerful.
The Problem Early drafts often include vague or overly general word choices and flabby sentences. Cutting words that add little, making verbs active, and replacing weak word choices with stronger ones can greatly increase the power of a remembered event essay.
The Correction The following three steps can help you tighten your language and make it more powerful.
- Circle empty intensifiers, such as just, very, certain, and really. Now reread each sentence, omitting the circled word. If the sentence still makes sense without the word, delete it.
- Circle all forms of the verb to be (such as am, is, are, was, and were). Now reread each sentence that includes a circled word, and ask yourself, “Could I revise the sentence or combine it with another sentence to create an active construction?” Examples:
- Review your descriptions, highlighting or underlining adjectives, adverbs, and prepositional phrases. Now reread them, imagining a more specific noun or verb that could convey the same idea in fewer words.
Dialogue Issues
The Problem Remembered event essays often include dialogue, but writers sometimes have trouble using the conventions of dialogue correctly. One common problem occurs with punctuation marks:
- In American English, the opening quotation mark hugs the first word of the quotation. Commas belong inside the closing quotation mark, but end punctuation can go inside or outside the closing quotation mark, depending on whether the end punctuation belongs to the quotation or the end of the sentence.
- Speaker tags reflect what the speaker was thinking, feeling, or doing.
- A new paragraph is typically used to indicate a change in speaker.
The Correction Revise the punctuation, add speaker tags, or start a new paragraph as needed:
Using the Past Perfect
The Problem Remembered event essays often mention events that occurred before the main action. To convey this sequence of events, writers use the past-perfect tense rather than the simple past tense:
| Past Perfect | Simple Past |
| had traveled | traveled |
| had been | was |
| had begun | began |
Failing to use the past perfect when it is needed can make your meaning unclear. (What happened when, exactly?)
The Correction Check places where you recount events to verify that you are using the past perfect to indicate actions that had already been completed at the time of another past action (she had finished her work when we saw her).
Note for Multilingual Writers It is important to remember that the past perfect is formed with had followed by a past participle. Past participles usually end in -ed, -d, -en, -n, or -t—worked, hoped, eaten, taken, bent—although some are irregular (such as begun or chosen).
