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Area of weakness Errors or suggestionsSpellings These words are not always picked up by the spell checker because often they are in fact the wrong word!

Eg: where and were

Grammar Have you used capital letters for proper nouns?Do the subject and the verb always agree?

Eg: The songs was

Eg: using capital letters = The choirs assembled at The Royal Albert Hall for the concert.

PunctuationHave you used commas, apostrophes, semi colons and full stops appropriately? Have you used quotation marks and inverted commas in the correct places?

Freds guitar (missing apostrophe)

Remember commas are used in lists between items and the same rule applies to sentences where you may have a series of actions. E.g. She ran down the hill, collected her children, went to the bus stop and left town.

Semi colon = separates a main clause and a sub clauseQuestion marks = direct or rhetorical questions

ParagraphingHave you used paragraphs every time you talk about a new subject?Have you linked your paragraphs effectively?

Have you got a clear topic sentence?

Have you used discourse markers such as; On the other hand, contrastingly, similarly etc.

Writing styleHave you adopted a formal tone?Is what you are saying clear?

No slang, no abbreviations, use of personal pronoun ‘I’ only when giving a substantiated opinion. Are your sentences

ReferencingHave you used quotations properly?Have you used end notes or foot notes?

Is your bibliography complete?

Every time you make an assertion you should use a citation, example or quotation to back up what you’re saying.

Ensure that you reference and cite everything according to the house style booklet.