5 Sentence Errors

1.  Old Sentence: "When can I do it?" "How do I fit my schedule around it?", etc...

So I'm still not entirely sure about this one, but I think that since I'm not actually quoting anyone that I shouldn't have the quotation marks around these questions that I'm asking myself.

New Sentence: When can I do it? How do I fit my schedule around it?, etc...


2.  Old Sentence: Another common effect of long bouts of time in the practice room is overuse injuries. 


With this sentence it isn't very clear if I should use "is" or "are" to relate to the effect (singular) or the overuse injuries (plural).  So I decided to just rewrite the whole sentence so I didn't have to worry about this.


New Sentence: Other common effects of long bouts of time in the practice room are overuse injuries.




3.  Old Sentence:  I am a first year music performance major at BYU and am quickly finding out how hard the 3-4 hours a day, 6 days a week, plus an additional 1-2 hours a week of orchestra practicing can be.  


I found out in "Writing Matters" that you're supposed to write out numbers that are less than 10 (1 versus one).


New Sentence:  I am a first year music performance major at BYU and am quickly finding out how hard the three to four hours a day, six days a week, plus an additional one to two hours a week of orchestra practicing can be.




4.  Old Sentence:  It’s common for musicians to get tendinitis or carpal tunnel if they practice for too long without breaks or stretching.   


I realized that this sentence doesn't follow the parallelism rule we learned about.  The tenses of the verbs don't match.


New Sentence:  It's common for musicians to get tendinitis or carpal tunnel if they practice for too long without taking breaks or stretching.




5.  Old Sentence:  While it’s important for music majors to spend a majority of their time on their major, if doing this causes them to get injured, then the injury becomes a much bigger problem for them than learning all of their music perfectly.


The problem here is the same kind of thing in number four.  The parallelism doesn't match between "the injury" and "learning all of their music perfectly."


New Sentence:  While it’s important for music majors to spend a majority of their time on their major, if doing this causes them to get injured, then the injury becomes a much bigger problem for them than the task of learning all of their music perfectly.