Saturday, April 4, 2009

My common grammar mistakes

I started to learn English from the primary school already. But during writing an English article, there are sill some common mistakes when I write a sentence .

1. Wrong word or wrong word form
It is caused due to the careless of tense, or unfamiliar with phrases. There are some examples coming from my writing assignments:
1a. Nuclear energy is considered as a clean energy since it does not generated greenhouse gases. (Wrong)
1b. Nuclear energy is considered as a clean energy since it does not generate greenhouse gases. (Correct)
The verb behind ‘does’ should use its original form.
2a. This is not an accident due to the human activity but the natural geology movement. (Wrong)
2b. This is not an accident due to the human activity but the natural geological movement. (Correct)
Here ‘geology’ is supposed to be a adjective, so we need to change it to ‘geological’.
3a. Because we need to be responsible to the public, environment and even our further generation. (Wrong)
3b. Because we need to be responsible to the public, environment and even our future generation. (Correct)
In this case, I misuse the word ‘further’ since it normally expresses the long distance. To express the time distance, we need to use the word ‘future’.

2. Article
I always miss the article ‘the’ or add an extra ‘the’ in my article.
1a. Nuclear power is a technology to release the internal energy through nuclear reaction. (Wrong)
1b. Nuclear power is a technology to release internal energy through nuclear reaction. (Correct)
In my article, ‘internal energy’ is firstly mentioned here, and ‘through nuclear reaction’ is further express the meaning of ‘internal energy’, so ‘the’ is not needed here.
2a. However, high cost of CCS is still the truth. (Wrong)
2b. However, the high cost of CCS is still the truth. (Correct)
Here, ‘high cost’ is used to specific express the cost of CCS, so ‘the’ is needed in front of ‘high cost’.

3. Subject-verb agreement
When dealing with long sentence, it is easy to make a subject-verb disagreement.
1a. However, it is considered effective because fewer nuclear fuel are needed to produce the same amount of electricity. (Wrong)
1b. However, it is considered effective because less nuclear fuel is needed to produce the same amount of electricity. (Correct)
Here the subject ‘nuclear fuel’ is not countable, so we need to use ‘less’ instead of ‘fewer’; to make the agreement with subject, we need to use ‘is’ instead of ‘are’.

In conclusion, there is still a long distance for me to proficiently writing proper English. More practices are necessary to let me overcome the weakness.

1 comment:

  1. The way you structure your points is very neat and concise. For the 1st one you explained that you maybe unfamilar with the phrases but you did not explain for the other two.

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