Summary of common grammatical mistakes

Upon reviewing the writing assignment 1 and 2, I can conclude there are three common grammatical mistakes that are usually made in my essay writings.

The first common grammatical mistake is using wrong prepositions. I found that preposition is very tricky when try to describe position between two objects. For example:
Incorrect: I travelled China this year
Correct: I travelled across China this year
Preposition is hard for Chinese student as we are non-native English speakers because English preposition might have two or more translations in mandarin. That’s why it is very confusing when writing an essay.

The second common grammatical error made in my essay frequently is tense. Especially, I am always confused by perfect tense and past perfect tense.
Incorrect: The project has been finished last month.
Correct: The project had been finished last month.
Here I want to express that the project has been finished, but it was done in last month. So it has to use past perfect tense.

The last common grammatical error is run-on sentence. Sometimes in one sentence that joins two independent clauses without punctuation or appropriate conjunction. For example
Incorrect: Rachel is very smart, she began reading when she was three years old.
Correct: Rachel is very smart. She began reading when she was three years old.
The error is also can be corrected by changing ‘,’ to ‘;’.

In conclusion, throughout the course EG1471, it helped me to improve my English essay writing. I believe that EG1471 will also help me to write better essay in my following studies.