Edit and proofread your draft.

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Several errors often occur in profiles, including problems with the punctuation of quotations and the integration of participial phrases. The following guidelines will help you check your essay for these common errors.

Checking the Punctuation of Quotations

Because most profiles are based in part on interviews, you have probably quoted one or more people in your essay. When you proofread your writing, check to make sure you have observed the strict conventions for punctuating quotations:

What to Check For

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.

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Integrating Participial Phrases

The Problem Consider the following sentence:

You know that “Snoring blissfully” applies to Bob, because in English, modifying phrases or clauses like snoring blissfully are understood to apply to the nouns they precede or follow. That’s why, when you read

you know that Regina studied for twenty-eight hours. So what does the following sentence, taken from a 2003 government press release, mean?

—that the fire investigation team was started by an arsonist? That may not be what the author of this sentence meant, but that’s what the sentence says. This kind of error—called a dangling modifier—can confuse readers (or make them chuckle).

The Correction When editing or proofreading your writing, look for modifying clauses or phrases. In each case, ask yourself whether the person or thing performing the action in the modifier is named immediately before or after the modifier. If it isn’t, you have several options for fixing the error:

Change the subject of the sentence.

Change the modifier.

Move the modifying phrase or clause.

A Common Problem for Multilingual Writers: Adjective Order

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The Problem In trying to present the subject of your profile vividly and in detail, you have probably included many descriptive adjectives. When you include more than one adjective in front of a noun, you may have difficulty sequencing them. For example, do you write a large old ceramic pot or an old large ceramic pot?

The Correction The following list shows the order in which adjectives are ordinarily arranged in front of a noun:

  1. Amount (a/an, the, six)
  2. Evaluation (good, beautiful, ugly, serious)
  3. Size (large, small, tremendous)
  4. Shape, length (round, long, short)
  5. Age (young, new, old)
  6. Color (red, black, green)
  7. Origin (Asian, Brazilian, German)
  8. Material (wood, cotton, gold)
  9. Noun used as an adjective (computer [as in computer program], cake [as in cake pan])

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