← All posts

The grammar mistakes that quietly cost CSS aspirants the most marks

An essay can have a strong argument, a clear structure and real evidence, and still lose heavily on Language. The reason is usually not exotic grammar. It is a handful of patterns repeated forty times in three thousand words — patterns most aspirants have never had pointed out, because nobody has ever marked their practice essays.

What follows are the error types that appear most often in the essays we analyse. None of them is difficult to fix once you can see it. The difficulty is that they are invisible from the inside: you wrote the sentence, so it reads correctly to you.

1. Subject–verb agreement across a long subject

This is the single most common error, and it is rarely a case of not knowing the rule. Aspirants know that a plural subject takes a plural verb. The error appears when several words separate the subject from the verb, and the verb ends up agreeing with the nearest noun instead of the real subject.

The subject is facilities, not areas. By the time you reach the verb, the nearer noun has taken over. The same thing happens with relative clauses:

How to catch it

When you revise, put your finger on the verb and trace backwards to the actual subject, ignoring everything between them. If the sentence still works with that pair alone — facilities were, countries hold — the agreement is right.

2. "There" where "their" belongs

Under exam pressure, at speed, by hand, this one slips through constantly. It is worth singling out because it is trivially fixable and because examiners read it as carelessness rather than as a language limitation.

The test is quick: if the word is followed by something being possessed — their government, their responsibilities, their own homes — it is their. If you could replace it with "in that place," it is there.

3. Plurals of words that are already plural

A small set of words is uncountable or irregular in English, and adding an -s to them is a recognisable marker of second-language writing. The most frequent offender by a wide margin is peoples.

• peoples → people (the plural of "person" is already "people"; "peoples" only means distinct ethnic or national groups)
• informations → information
• advices → advice
• childrens → children
• womens / mens → women / men
• criterias → criteria
• social medias → social media

4. Double comparatives

A comparative is formed either by adding -er or by putting more in front — never both. The doubled form is common in spoken Pakistani English, which is exactly why it travels into written work unnoticed.

The same applies to superlatives: most easiest should be easiest, and more higher should be higher.

5. First-person voice

"In my opinion," "I think," and "I believe" weaken an argument rather than strengthening it. The CSS essay expects an impersonal, analytical register in which the argument carries its own authority. If a claim is sound, it does not need you to announce that you hold it.

Notice that removing the first person forced the second sentence to say something more specific. That is usually what happens, and it is the real benefit.

6. Contractions

Don't, can't, it's, won't belong to speech and to informal writing. In a formal examination essay they should be written out in full. This costs nothing to fix and is entirely mechanical.

What is not a mistake

One correction worth making in the other direction: passive voice is not a grammatical error. A great deal of preparation advice treats it as one, and that advice is wrong.

Political stability is ultimately secured not when citizens are compelled to remain silent, but when they possess the confidence to speak.

That sentence is passive and it is better passive. The passive voice is appropriate when the action matters more than the actor, when the actor is unknown, or when the sentence needs to keep its focus on an institution or an outcome. It becomes a problem only when it is used so heavily that the writing turns vague about who is doing what. Treat it as a matter of style to be judged sentence by sentence, not as an error to be eliminated.

The underlying problem

Every error above is easy to correct once identified. That is precisely what makes them expensive: they persist not because they are hard, but because nobody points them out. An aspirant can write thirty practice essays and repeat the same agreement error in all thirty, because no one has ever marked one.

If you are preparing without access to an academy or a teacher who returns marked work, the single highest-value thing you can do is find some way to have your writing read critically. Trade essays with a serious study partner. Read your own work aloud, slowly, a day after writing it. Keep a list of the errors you find and check for those specific patterns before you submit.

Whatever method you use, the principle holds: an error you cannot see is an error you will repeat until the day of the exam.