Grading papers again. A lot of the recurring grammatical errors are understandable (e.g. "can not" rather than "cannot") but there's one that I always run into that I can't understand -- people who quote, and then cite parenthetically, but with two periods, one before the citation, one after -- e.g. Galileo said "blah blah blah." (Galileo, 94). I just don't see how that could look right to anyone.

Update: forget that, here's the recurring mistake that is really inexplicable -- quotes that have the first quotation mark, but no closing quotation mark. I see this enough to know that it's no typo -- now how the hell does somebody who's ever read anything (in any language?) think it's okay to have a quote with no closing quotation mark???

Another update: I know that forming the possessive of a word that ends with 's' can be tricky -- y'know just an apostrophe if it's a plural noun, an apostrophe-s if it's a singular noun (I've been known to screw it up myself, and the paper topics actually incorrectly listed "Ursus'" rather than "Ursus's") -- but I have a bunch of students who think that the correct option is to AVOID THE APOSTROPHE ALTOGETHER! As in "Descartes argument is unsound." Again, this is happening frequently enough that I know it's not a typo, but systematic (and probably even conscious, which is the disturbing part like: dude, what do I do with the apostrophe here? Oh, I guess I should just leave it out). Though I guess I should note that the rule doesn't work for Descartes, whose possessive form is "Descartes'".  ¶ 3:42 PM