I wrote a personal story about a memorable experience I had in high school. My colleagues have reviewed it and I review it for errors. The following essay will explain the errors found in the personal narrative I wrote. To make this grammatical analysis more understandable, I will divide it into five categories of errors: morphological errors, lexical errors, syntactic errors, mechanical errors and errors of stylistic choice.1. Morphological errors: Morphological errors are errors that occur with tense, subject-verb agreement, determiners, and noun endings. This narrative had two morphological errors. The first example: “Our band director had assigned me a room with four other members of the color guard.” Changing “had assigned” to “assigned” would correct this morphological error. The second example: “They had rented a hall and held a banquet-style feast for all the members of the band and color guard.” Changing “had rented” to “rented” would correct this morphological error.2. Lexical Errors: Lexical errors are errors that occur with word choice, word form, informal usage, idiomatic error, or pronoun error. This narrative had a real lexical error. The lexical error found was: “It was exciting to see all those people and all the cameras.” If “seeing everything” were changed to “seeing” the sentence would sound better to the reader.3. Syntactic Errors: Syntactic errors are errors that occur in sentence structure such as; run-on sentences, fragments or comma splices. This story contained seven syntactic errors, most of which were repeated phrases that required the addition of a comma. The first example: “Once everyone was settled in, we drove for 16 hours, stopping three or four times along the way.” Adding… to the center of the paper… in both sentences provided organization within the narrative and led the reader to a greater understanding of the sentences. The use of transitional prepositional phrases also allowed for ease of reading the narrative. An example of this: “Once there, we checked into our hotel.” In this sentence, “once there” introduces the reader to the sentence adding stylistic flow to the narrative. In conclusion, mistakes were made in this personal narrative. It seems that syntax errors are my downfall. I tend to have mistakes with the placement of commas in sentences. I believe these errors are usually caught when the correct editing is done before finalizing a draft. Analyzing your work for grammatical errors is never an easy task; peer review is always a good idea before turning in a final product, as some errors may not seem like errors to the author.
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