This is how I feel right now
I have noticed that some of my students have been using my site to self-correct the English Conventions Worksheets.
This is great!
I have noticed, however, that these corrections are sometimes incomplete. I have said before that if you are self-correcting your work using the site, I will give you full credit on the worksheet assignment, regardless of how many errors you made in your first, independent attempt. This is my way of encouraging you to look closer at your work before turning it in and rewarding you for using the resources available to you.
But for you to effectively self-correct, you must compare your work and the example answers on my site carefully. Most everyone is doing this, but not all, so I thought it merited some direction here.
When checking your work, it is vitally important that you consider the purpose of the worksheet. The majority of them are focused on a single, specific skill, such as fragments, subordinate clauses, run-on sentences, and other, similar grammatical plagues. The corrected versions of these worksheets are geared toward helping you identify where these items are, and they tend to be in bold, italics, or both.
With this in mind, you first step should be to look for the sections in bold or italics. These are areas that require correction. Compare them with your copy (before your corrections). What has changed? Has a period been replaced with a comma? Did a capital become a lowercase? Did two sentences become one?
On the above worksheet (number 9), the corrected version of my site would look like this:
The city of Machu Picchu is an example of their skill with tools like the plumb bob and the wooden roller, which they used for heavy construction.
Notice that everything after "an example" is in italics? When compared with the original (above), I find that this section was actually two sentences. That means that both are fragments (or some other error) that must be corrected. When I compare what I have done (above, image) with the corrected example, I find that I have joined the fragments, removed the unwanted capitals, and replaced the punctuation as necessary. I did good! And I made sure to use the correct revision marks.
If you have any trouble, please come and see me for tutoring. I'm available Monday mornings at 8 or Thursday afternoons at 3.
Happy editing.