Keela Disterhaft- Week 15

For my assignment this week, I worked with my mom on a paper she wrote last year. It was a paper on Interpersonal Communication. I was impressed by how much I was able to communicate with her about the errors she made in her paper.

The first mistake I could identify was a subject/ verb agreement rule. My mom made a list of topics she learned and mixed up the verbs “is” and “are”. The verb she used was “is” and the subject of the sentence was “communications”. Prior to this class, I would have been able to identify that the word usage was incorrect but I wouldn’t be able to tell her why.

            Another common error I saw throughout her paper was the usage of commas. This is one of my weak points so I was a little hesitant to start marking the paper for incorrect use. There were areas of her paper where I felt that she desperately needed commas because there were non-essential phrases. Again, this was something I could explain to her instead of just saying, “just do it because I know it’s right.”

            This was a great assignment and I hope that I can continue to improve my editing skills as I progress in my career!