There’s this thing about blogs, walls and tweets—millions write, but who actually reads? This blog on frequent mistakes made in undegraduate seminar papers is a bit of self-therapy I guess. Maybe I’ll feel better after having vented my impatience and committed the causes of my frustration to virtual paper. However, there is the very small chance that some people will actually read this here before submitting their own papers, and that small chance alone is worth it. 🙂

If you detect some mistakes that you’ve made (and submitted)—no worries, I won’t remember, and it’s nothing I would hold against you anyway. I made mistakes like as well. I just recently learned about the correct use of various kinds of dashes in English, for instance, from a student of mine who works in publishing. It’s just that I put these things down in the margins of my students’ papers over and over again, and then… I file the papers. 🙂 Small issues like comma problems or faulty expressions usually don’t make it into my evaluation sheets, they’re not that important individually, but when you mark them for the umpteenth time, they do get annoying, so I grumble and complain to my colleagues or to whoever happens to be present instead of teaching my students to avoid these things beforehand. This blog is an attempt at a better solution. So here we go…