Common Writing Mistakes

Mistake 1: Not making the first page of the paper, perfect.

The first page is the first impression. Show your teacher that you understand the importance of paying attention to detail. Look at the first page below. Don't be this guy:

The "too much space" problem is a MS Word problem. To fix it, you have to click on the bottom corner of "paragraph" in the menu and then check "do not add space between paragraphs."

Mistake 2: Using any of the following words in your paper:

Seriously. Don't use any of these words in an essay.

Mistake 3: Not italicizing or underlining book titles.

Novel and play titles are italicized or underlined. Both are grammatically correct. The MLA messed things up because they (now) require all titles to be italicized.

Mistake 4: Not putting quotation marks around article or poem titles.

A poem like "The Raven" or an article title like "World Series Predictions" is placed in quotation marks. The same is true of a song title like "American Idiot."

Mistake 5: Putting the period outside of quotation marks.

In America, when we end a sentence with a quotation like above, the period goes inside the quotation marks: "American Idiot." The same is true when it's a comma (goes inside). Putting the period outside is a British thing. You can verify that here if you have doubts.

As usual, the MLA makes this more confusing. For more on what to do with punctuation when a citation is involved, click here.

Mistake 6: Putting a period at the end of a sentence that's followed by a quotation.

When a full sentence introduces a quotation, use a colon (:) before the quoting the passage--not a period. A period says "i'm done" to the reader, and a colon says "I'm done, but wait, there's more."

• Kumalo’s personal losses are great but his tribal losses are worse: “When the Reverend Stephen Kumalo travels from his home in Ndotsheni to the capital of Johannesburg, he encounters a disintegration of tribal customs and family life” (“Africa Alive”).

For more info on punctuating quotations in MLA format, go here to the OWL webpage.

Mistake 7: Not citing web sources correctly, especially when there's no author.

When there is an author, citing web sources is simple--just put the author's name in the citation: (Carillo). When there is not an author, you put a few key words from the title of your source, and you put them in quotation marks inside the parentheses: ("Africa Alive").