Errors by Students in English 271

Intelligible Errors:

[I believe that these errors can be explained in a way that will enable a conscientious student to avoid them in the future.]

I don’t think she’s bitter about taking care of her daughter, because she says “somewhere a small girl standing next to her mother watching to see how it's done” meaning that she wants to teach her daughter how to live life, so for now, she’ll help her daughter, fold the laundry, but hopefully sometime soon she can get back to her dreams of being a poet. --The quotation is not properly embedded.

Plath writes in the beginning of her poem “an elephant, a ponderous house, a melon strolling on two tendrils.” -- The quotation is not properly introduced.

Browning writes of the Duke’s feelings on his duchess’s affections:
A heart – how shall I say? – too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed: she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
--Your introduction to the quote should make it clear that the "heart" is the heart of the speaker's last Duchess.

Neruda uses waves as an example because waves can travel without boundaries; they have the freedom to go wherever they please, "I must feel the crash of the hard water and gather is up in a perpetual cup." -- The quotation is not properly introduced.

In this poem there is little imagery and is very dull to the reader, "Then took the other, as just as fair / And having perhaps the better claim, / Because it was grassy and wanted wear." -- You should have introduced the quotation, and the introduction should have indicated why the quotation supported your point. Also, the introduction should have left no source of confusion, such as the puzzlement created by the first word of the quotation, "Then." "Then" after something else? What else?

Not only does the poem show how a woman feels during pregnancy, also uses a metaphor to show how a woman's life changes significantly after the pregnancy, "Boarded the train there's no getting off." -- missing comma -- The embedded quotation is not properly introduced and the whole thing is a very long comma splice.

The poem talks of a shirt that she is folding, “a giant shirt” as she writes in the poem, from this we can infer that maybe its giant because it comes from an oppressive man. --comma splice. Also, "its" for "it's"

A road not taken -- Should be "The Road Not Taken" -- This is a very serious error. Quoting accurately is a fundamental to writing about literature.

The Poem does an excellent job at creating an image for the readers mind to help him/her escape reality for a moment. --missing apostrophe

Gallagher writes “Nothing can stop our tenderness. I'll get back to the poem. I'll get back to being a woman” which I think means that before everything that is happening to her at the time of this poem, she had dreams of being a poet and a woman to herself, but she ended up having a child.--missing comma--

When I graduated High School I had two roads that I could have taken either going to college or going to work like the rest of my family did. -- missing punctuation

Emily Dickinson, a famous American poet lived in Massachusetts with her parents and siblings till she died in 1886. -- missing comma

One of her famous poems, "I felt a funeral in my brain" portrays how death had an influence in her poetry. -- missing comma

Emily Dickinson lived a lonely life of solitude in her family's old house, while taking care of her dying mother. -- Extra comma

When reading aloud a poem, audience members have a greater relationship with the poem than by written poetry because of the emotion the spoken word can bring out in people. --dangling modifier

He thought that she smiled too often at other people. The poem doesn’t actually give an example of the last duchess flirting with other men. -- A "however" at the beginning of the second sentence would make everything more clear.

The poem has a difficult time keeping the reader's attention because it has lots of repetition of words and how the poem never has a clear idea of what it is trying to say. -- parallelism error.

Neruda writes about how a person should learn to free themselves. -- agreement error: shift from singular to plural

The Poem does an excellent job at creating an image for the reader's mind to help them escape reality for a moment. -- agreement error: shift from singular to plural

I thought that whoever took the less traveled path seemed to be happy with their decision -- agreement error. "whoever" ... "their"

When he states the words, "I have come" meaning that his poem will help them free their busy minds by having the readers imagine an image of the sea and the freedom that comes with it. -- sentence fragment

Using these metaphors to compare a pregnant woman to an elephant shows how she feels so large. Comparing herself to a house by saying she is as large as a house with a child living inside and how she is feeling like a walking melon, as big and round. --sentence fragment

"I'm a riddle in nine syllables, an elephant, a ponderous house, A melon strolling on two tendrils." -- Should be: '"I'm a riddle in nine syllables, / An elephant, a ponderous house, / A melon strolling on two tendrils." '

Men often times believe that showing any physical break of emotion will take away the title of "man". --Never put a double quotation mark to the right of a period or comma.