Overview: What Are Mechanical Errors?
Although many proofreading questions on the English portion of the SAT and ACT are to catch errors in standard English usage, some questions involve errors in capitalization, spelling, and punctuation. These types of mechanical errors are also common in everyday writing, such as classroom and test essays. While many spelling errors might be caught with the spell-check, capitalization and punctuation errors will not. However, they will be caught by teachers and editors, so it’s best to check for them before the paper is submitted.
Disadvantages of Mechanical Errors
For the most part, errors in capitalization, spelling, and punctuation do not change the readability of the sentence. Errors in capitalization and spelling violate standardization, and errors in punctuation may change the meaning subtly. For example, compare the statement “The store is opening tomorrow” with the question The store is opening tomorrow?” Therefore, errors are harder to catch.
Capitalization Errors
It’s merely a case of reviewing capitalization conventions to proofread for capitalization errors. Proper nouns and pronouns are capitalized, as well as the first words in a sentence. However, if the proper noun is the name of a business and consists of two or more words, more than the first word is capitalized. Compare “Apple Computers” and “Dell”. In addition, words may be in a passage that shouldn’t be capitalized, such as “The famous Operatic Tenor Enrico Caruso was really a baritone.”
Spelling Errors
Test developers use the tendency for skilled readers to substitute the correct words, whether or not they are spelled correctly, as long as the first few and last letters are correct. That makes spelling errors hard to catch when proofreading. The song, “The Consequences of Fall-ing” refers to the problems that result from acting on an infatuation. Even though readers understand the sentence, whether or not they know the song, they might not notice the spelling error. (There is a spelling error there, even in a paragraph about spelling errors.)
Punctuation Errors
Punctuation marks are the directions that writers use to determine how words should be read. Although punctuation errors are hard to catch, they depend on typical conventions. Sentences must be ended by periods, question marks, or exclamation points. Commas in compound sentences separate independent clauses. Commas are also used to separate three or more nouns, phrases, or clauses in a series.
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