How to stamp out your common mistakes in English from the bottom up

The first step is to identify your regular mistakes in English and then defeat them one by one.

Which mistakes do I mean?

The ones that make you groan “not again” after hitting send or publish or when they’ve just slipped out of your mouth.

Here are some typical examples:

Everyone are coming to the party. (subject-verb agreement)

My sister gave me his car. (noun-pronoun agreement)

I ran to the corner and see the robber. (consistent verb forms)

The health is very important. (articles)

We discussed about the contract. (prepositions)

Go through several pieces of writing and notice where you often stumble or are not quite sure about the rule.

Also think about when you’re speaking – what mistakes do you make that you kick yourself about afterwards?

Having identified the main problems, the next step is to pick out only one mistake to focus on improving. Start with one that is relatively easy.

If you’re not sure about the correct usage, check online or in a grammar book such as How English Works by Michael Swan and Catherine Walter.

Then when you’re using that particular form, try to get it out correctly. Of course this won’t happen overnight. You’ll go through the stages of still making the mistake, then making the mistake and quickly self-correcting and finally not making the mistake.

So yes, it does take a while and it can’t all be done at once.

But this bottom-up approach of continuous incremental improvement makes it possible to overcome these pesky problems.

The key is to focus on only one issue at a time and when that’s going well, to move on to the next one. And repeat.

Next week we’ll look at another way of tackling habitual errors by using a top-down tactic.

Do you need help identifying your common mistakes? Please get in touch.

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