5 Common Mistakes to Avoid in Your English Writing

Common mistakes are made by everyone while writing in English, but you need to avoid as many of them as possible. This is because you want the highest quality write-up possible, and mistakes can bring the quality down and hamper the message you want to send across. They can make your write-up look dull and amateurish.

There are so many things that you need to avoid but we’re only going to talk about the 5 major ones that are often made by people. This way, you’ll know what to look out for during the process of writing, so your write-up comes out to be perfect. So, let’s get started.

Common English Writing Mistakes That You Should Avoid

Below, we’ve compiled a list of the most common mistakes that we’ve seen in write-ups. We’ll briefly talk about each one along with telling you how you can avoid them.

1. Vague Or Unclear Ideas

This is the first mistake that most writers make in their content. Not only them, but students also do it in their essay write-ups. 

When writing content that has to be published online and essays that carry marks awarded based on its quality, the ideas included in them have to be accurate and it should feel like you’ve done your research before presenting them.

Ensure your ideas are well-defined and carry some weight, so they look practical. Try to communicate with them effectively. Don’t ramble and leave points unfocused. You can also add some evidence to support your ideas. 

This way, the information you’re providing won’t feel like it’s vague to the reader. However, one thing that you should keep in mind is that the ideas you’re giving should be unique. They shouldn’t be someone else’s because this practice is usually looked down upon.

2. Factual Errors And Unsupported Claims

When writing academically or professionally, you might need to add factual information to your write-up. This can be the evidence we talked about earlier or some stats that you add to provide the reader with some extra information.

Sometimes, students and writers add factual information from bogus sources without realising that the facts are not true. If someone double-checks them and realizes they’re wrong, it can look bad for you.

Besides this, sometimes you can make mistakes while adding facts and provide the user with wrong information. So, it’s always recommended to double-check information and see if it is correct.

The second thing is adding a source. Writers can forget to add a source to the factual data. This should be avoided at any cost. Properly cite sources for claims that require validation.

3. Grammar, Spelling, and Punctuation Errors

These mistakes are perhaps the most common ones in any write-up. It is probably because they can easily get overlooked and also because they require high language proficiency to not occur in the first place.

Grammar mistakes usually occur when the sentence structuring isn’t correct. Spelling mistakes can be typos, and punctuation errors can occur when you’re in a hurry.

All these can decrease the quality of your write-up. So you need to carefully examine if your content has any of these mistakes.

What’s recommended is that you write carefully in the first place and double-check the spelling of words that you are not sure about so these mistakes don’t occur.

However, if you’re not that proficient in English, we know these mistakes are bound to happen.

But don’t worry as you can use an online grammar checker to quickly review your write-up and fix any of these mistakes if they are present in your content.

4. Poorly Structured

The readability of a write-up is greatly reduced if it lacks proper structure. This mistake is usually made by new writers but is still a major one. 

Try to properly structure your write-up and follow hierarchy when you convey information. It should have a logical flow and each sentence should be related to the previous one.

Each paragraph should provide a new idea that is related to the title of the write-up. To take this even further and improve the readability of your content, add headings, and subheadings to organize your ideas in a way that is easy for the readers to understand.

You can also add bullet points to the write-up where they are needed. If you discuss the main points and ideas in bullets, the readers can easily skim through it, and they won’t have to spend time looking for the information they need by reading the whole thing.

5. Plagiarism 

The last thing we’re adding to this list of things you should avoid is plagiarism. It is a serious offence and can bring the credibility of the writer into question. 

Plagiarism is severely discouraged in academic and content writing. It can occur in your content even if you didn’t intentionally copy someone’s work. It is because there is so much information available on the internet about everyone.

It can just so happen that your write-up can be similar to one that is already published online. So, it is always best to check your content for plagiarism.

The only way to do that is to use an online plagiarism detector. If the detector finds plagiarism in your writing, you’re going to have to remove it.

To do that, you can paraphrase the supposedly plagiarized text or remove it from your write-up entirely. 

Final Words

Writing in English can be fairly easy for native writers, but they do have to avoid making some basic mistakes. In this article, we have listed down some of the most common mistakes that occur in English write-ups. We’ve also discussed how you can avoid each of them.