Why accuracy marks disappear
Every writing task on the IGCSE and International GCSE English routes we teach rewards accurate spelling, punctuation and grammar. This is true for First Language and ESL. Able students often lose marks here that they did not need to lose.
A good idea with careless errors loses marks for control, not for the idea. Most of these errors are ones the writer could have fixed.
Proofreading means catching them. It is harder than it sounds, because you read your own work as you meant it, not as it is written. Good proofreading is a set of tricks to stop that autopilot.
A checking routine for exam pressure
- Protect the time. Stop writing a few minutes early. A corrected error is worth more than one extra rushed sentence.
- Know your usual errors. Keep a short list in your head: your tense slip, your comma habit, your spelling trap. Check for those first.
- Read for one thing at a time. Do one pass for tenses, one for punctuation, one for spelling. Checking everything at once means catching very little.
- Slow down. Proofreading is not reading for meaning. Look at each word, and point along the line with your pen if it helps.
- Say it in your head. Hearing the sentence quietly shows a missing word, a wrong tense or a sentence that never ends.
- Correct neatly. Cross out with one line and write the correction above. A messy tangle is hard for the examiner to read.
Step two saves the most time. Everyone makes different mistakes, so a check aimed at yours finds far more than a general read-through.
A worked example
This is our own example for teaching.
Before: Their going to the beach later, and me and my brother has already packed our bag’s.
After: They’re going to the beach later, and my brother and I have already packed our bags.
A focused check finds three errors.
- “Their” should be “They’re”, which is short for “they are”. Test it by saying “they are” in its place.
- “me and my brother has” should be “my brother and I have”. The pronoun is wrong, and so is the verb, because “brother and I” is plural.
- “bag’s” should be “bags”. A plural never takes an apostrophe.
None of these is hard. Each is a recurring slip that a student can learn to find in seconds.
If this is where marks are going missing, a trial hour with an experienced teacher can work on it one-to-one.
Common mistakes
- No time left. The student wrote until the last second and never checked.
- A vague read-through. Looking for “anything wrong” lets the autopilot win.
- Reading for sense only. The meaning is fine, so the errors survive.
- Not knowing your own errors. The check has no focus.
- Messy corrections. A fixable slip becomes an unreadable tangle.
A student who gives back the last minutes to a focused check protects marks that extra content would not win. Those marks were being lost to error, not to a lack of ability.
How to practise
Build your error list. Look at marked work and write down the three or four mistakes you make most. Update the list as you improve.
Then do single-error passes. Read a piece of your own writing once for tenses only, then again for punctuation only.
Finally, read aloud quietly and listen for sentences that stumble. Your ear notices what your eye repairs.
Keep every marked piece you get back. After a few weeks, the same few slips will keep appearing. That is your personal checklist, and it is more useful than any general rule list.
Where students usually get stuck
Students often know the rules but cannot see their own mistakes. In 1-to-1 lessons, our teachers mark your real writing, name the errors that repeat, and build the short checklist with you.
We then practise the habit of checking until it takes two minutes and feels automatic. This works for both First Language English and ESL students.
Tuition starts from RM70/hr. Book a paid one-hour trial and bring a recent piece of writing, so the teacher who would continue can show you which errors to hunt first.
What to read or try next
Compare your work with the annotated model responses, then try the practice tasks. To keep building accuracy, read how to read for explicit meaning and how to read for implicit meaning.