I’ve shown my previous post to my English teacher, who spent almost 40 minutes of a lesson editing the text. There are a lot of mistakes made by me there but most of them can be avoided by practice, more reading, and improving my vocabulary. But two types of errors are interesting since I didn’t know about them till now. They are both related to the conjunction “and”.
Most puzzling was that I shouldn’t put a comma before the conjunction “and” in a compound sentence. Spellcheckers are putting coma there and most found English rules suggest that the comma is needed there. Nevertheless, I’ve been learning American English. It’s the most common in the world and more accessible with the most entertaining media in it. However, American English is trying to eliminate unnecessary commas and I shouldn’t put them in a compound sentence if it’s clear that “and” connects different parts of it.
Here is an article about that: http://grammartips.homestead.com/compoundsentences.html It’s over 20 years old, so now, commas are used even less often than described. Furthermore, examples from it are considered wrong by spellcheckers. I’m using Grammarly for that and suggest you use it too. It’s an Ukranian product and especially needs support now.
The second common mistake is that I use “and” at the start of the sentence. That’s wrong. You shouldn’t start a sentence with a conjunction. I haven’t known about that and spellcheckers don’t warn you. In Ukrainian, I often start sentences with “and” but there are three words for that conjunction in Ukrainian, so that might be ok. Also, I think Twitter affects this a lot. Since most of the time, I write and read English on Twitter and everyone there tries to shorten the text, “and” is often overused instead of using more appropriate words.
I think I can avoid other mistakes if I spend a lot of attention to the details of the text written by me and use a thesaurus to find synonyms more actively. One common thing is that I don’t use Perfect Continuus tenses when needed but I see that English natives don’t use it often. Also, I don’t use Perfect tenses in all paces required but I think that’s a common problem for everyone who doesn’t have such tenses in their native language.
Additionally, to convey your thoughts to a larger audience, it would be best to use words that a wider audience can understand without problems. I have that problem in Ukrainian too. To decorate text, you can and should use different uncommon words, but for the informational part, you should use simple and understandable words so even people beyond the context can understand you.
I need to read more and I hope you’ll continue reading me.
