Week 14 — Editing: Grammar, Mechanics & Common Errors

Welcome to your Week 14 Start Here page.

Why this matters

A job applicant checking a cover letter before it goes to a hiring manager, a lab technician proofreading a safety notice, and a volunteer sending a neighborhood newsletter can all lose a reader's trust over one small error.

In plain language

This week is the last pass on a draft: catching the small errors that make a reader stop trusting you. You learn to proofread (check a finished draft slowly for surface errors) as a skill with three moves. Then you learn one tool, the independent clause (a word group that can stand alone as a sentence), and use it to find the three errors at sentence boundaries: a sentence that is missing its core, two sentences joined by a comma alone, and two sentences run together with nothing between them. You also match verbs to their subjects, point pronouns at one clear word, place apostrophes, and put every comma to work. You practice on eight short error sentences written for this course, a neighborhood newsletter notice, and the running draft's revised paragraph.

• Already covered: Week 13 revised the draft as a whole, then tightened its sentences.
• This week: proofreading moves, the clause test, the five valid fixes, and the small marks.
• How they connect: the big pass came first; this is the last, closest pass.
• Where we're going next: Week 15, Reflection & the Writing Portfolio, shows what you learned.

Focus

How do I find and fix the errors that cost a reader's trust, without changing what I meant?

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

• [ ] proofread with three moves, one error type per pass
• [ ] name a fragment, a comma splice, or a fused sentence by its clauses
• [ ] repair a splice with one of the five valid fixes
• [ ] fix agreement, pronoun, apostrophe, and comma errors

To-do

Plan your week

1. Read Chapter 14 (about 45 minutes), then the lecture and slides.
2. Work the lecture tutorial (60–90 minutes) and the practice set (about 20 minutes).
3. Do the Writing Studio (about 90 minutes), the discussion, and the assignment.
4. Take the quiz.

Checkpoint: write the clause count beside each sentence of one paragraph of your draft, and fix any boundary error.

You've got this

Take it one pass at a time, and ask your instructor if a step snags.

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