The same handful of grammar slips cost marks from Class 6 right through to competitive exams. They are not signs of poor English — they are a small, fixed set of habits, most of them born from the way our languages differ from English. Fix these fifteen and your writing instantly upgrades.
Here is the encouraging truth hidden in every English answer sheet: the errors are astonishingly repetitive. Teachers marking hundreds of papers see the same dozen or so mistakes again and again, made by students whose English is otherwise perfectly good. That repetition is very good news, because it means you do not have to "get better at English" in some vague, endless way. You have to fix a specific, countable list of habits — and once fixed, they stay fixed, quietly earning you marks in every exam for years. Many of these slips come from mother-tongue interference: we translate a structure that is correct in Hindi, Telugu or another Indian language straight into English, where it happens to be wrong. Knowing that makes them easier to catch. Here are the fifteen that matter most.
Agreement and tense
This first group is about the machinery of a sentence — making subjects and verbs agree, and keeping tense consistent. These are the errors examiners notice fastest.
- "One of my friends are…" — one is the subject: "One of my friends is coming."
- "He do not know" — third person singular takes does: "He does not know."
- "I am knowing the answer" — state verbs (know, believe, own) avoid continuous: "I know the answer."
- "Yesterday I go" — time words command the tense: "Yesterday I went."
- "Since two years" — since takes a point, for takes a duration: "for two years", "since 2024".
Words that betray
This next group is the set of phrases that mark writing as "Indian English" to an examiner — usually because a word already contains the meaning we then repeat, or because a direct translation carries over a habit English does not share. They are especially worth fixing because they appear constantly in speech, so they slip into writing without you noticing.
- "Myself Ramesh" — introductions are "I am Ramesh."
- "Discuss about" — discuss carries its own about: "discuss the plan."
- "Return back / revert back" — the back is built in: "return", "revert".
- "Cousin brother" — English says just "cousin".
- "More better / most best" — comparatives don't stack: "better", "best".
Small words, big marks
The last group is the tiny words — the apostrophes, the homophones, the countable-versus-uncountable nouns. They look trivial, but they are the ones examiners use to separate careful writers from careless ones, and they cost real marks precisely because they are so easy to get right once you know the rule.
- its vs it's — it's = it is; possession is its.
- their/there/they're — possession/place/they are.
- "The honesty is important" — abstract nouns drop the: "Honesty is important."
- "Advices / informations" — uncountable: "advice", "information", "pieces of advice".
- "Cope up with" — it is simply "cope with".
How to actually fix them
Reading this list is the easy part, and on its own it changes nothing. Awareness of a grammar rule fades within days if you do not use it, and you will find yourself making the very mistakes you just nodded along to. Fixing a habit requires doing, not knowing — so here is a method that actually works, and it is deliberately slow.
Take one mistake from this list per day — just one. Write five correct sentences of your own using that structure, out of your own head, about your own life. The five-sentences rule matters: it forces the correct form through your hand and into your active memory, where it can fight the old wrong habit. One mistake a day, and in a little over two weeks you will have personally rehearsed all fifteen. This beats trying to fix everything at once, which fixes nothing.
Then close the loop by getting your real writing checked, because the mistakes you cannot see are the ones that survive. Paste a paragraph of your own — an essay, an answer, anything you actually wrote — into 7Solve and ask it to correct and, crucially, explain every error. The explanation is the whole point. A correction you simply see and copy fades like any other passive input; a correction you understand — why it was wrong, what rule it broke — sticks, because now you can catch the same mistake yourself next time. Explained corrections build the internal editor that stops the error at the source; silent ones just fix today's paragraph. Do this with a few pieces of your own writing and you will watch the same red marks slowly disappear, which is exactly what improving at English actually looks like.
Originally published on 7By.in.
Also on 7Marks: CA Foundation: How to Prepare and Pass in Your First Attempt