The following list is based on our ongoing analysis of senior AP Literature students at Burlingame High School, though it owes an obvious and important debt to the Stanford Study of Student Writing and in particular Andrea Lunsford's "Top Twenty" model, which we have adapted to meet your needs. More on these twenty issues to come, but these are the twenty we will focus on. They are in no order of importance or frequency; they all count.

The Top Twenty Writing Errors for AP Literature Students at BHS

1. Wrong word
2. Missing comma after an introductory element
3. Incomplete or missing documentation or citation
4. Vague pronoun reference
5. Mechanical error with a quotation
6. Unnecessary comma
7. Unnecessary and missing capitalization (esp tiltes and names)
8. Dangling (misplaced) modifier
9. Faulty sentence structure (logic, predication problems)
10.  Unnecessary shift in verb tense (specific to literary response/analysis: present tense)
11. Unnecessary or missing apostrophe (including its/it’s)
12. Poorly integrated quotation 
13. Unnecessary or missing hyphen/das
14. Preposition errors
15. Title formats
16. Parallelism
17. Who/whom
18. Format of numbers
19. Missing word?
20. Spelling (including homonyms)