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"I have been teaching college writing since 1992. The corrections I find myself making on student assignments fall into two general categories. The first concern problems of style - specifically, clarity and grace. So I mark the many places where my students commit wordiness, vagueness, awkwardness, banality, and so on. The other category is mistakes: usages that do not follow the accepted rules of standard English. From the beginning, it was clear to me that most student mistakes fall into a small number of categories - seven, to be precise. They have common qualities that speak to unfortunate cultural trends, which I'll discuss in a minute. But first, the seven deadly sins. (The examples in quotation marks are from actual student writing assignments.)"