Common Grammar Mistakes and How to Fix Them

Most grammar mistakes aren't about not knowing the rule — they're about losing track of a sentence's structure halfway through writing it. Subject-verb agreement breaks down most often in long sentences, where the subject and verb end up separated by a clause that has its own, different number: 'The list of items were long' should be 'was,' because the subject is 'list,' not 'items.'

Its versus it's trips up even careful writers because it breaks the usual rule: normally an apostrophe-s means possession, but 'it's' is always a contraction of 'it is' or 'it has.' The possessive form, unusually, has no apostrophe. When in doubt, expand it: if 'it is' doesn't fit, you need 'its.'

Comma splices — joining two complete sentences with only a comma — are easy to miss because they read fine out loud. The fix is a period, a semicolon, or a conjunction: 'I finished the draft, I sent it early' needs one of those instead of just the comma.

Dangling modifiers happen when a descriptive phrase at the start of a sentence doesn't actually attach to the subject that follows it: 'Walking to the store, the rain started' implies the rain was walking. The fix is making sure the subject right after the comma is the one doing the action described.

Fewer versus less follows one clean rule: fewer for things you count, less for things you measure. Fewer requests, less traffic. When you can put a number directly in front of the noun, it's fewer.