Analysis of syntactic errors in student papers: a study of sentence effectiveness and structure

Abstract

This study aims to identify and analyze various syntactic errors found in student papers and provide recommendations for their improvement. Two papers served as examples in this study: a paper from the Religion Group 3 course and a paper from Civics Education. The approach used was descriptive qualitative with data collection through documentation. Data were obtained by carefully reading, then identifying and classifying each sentence deemed problematic in terms of syntax. The analysis results indicate that there are two main types of errors frequently found. The first is errors related to sentence effectiveness, which are generally indicated by the use of excessive words and inappropriate conjunctions. The second is errors in sentence structure, which include the absence of subjects, incomplete sentences, and overall structures that appear unconnected to each other. These findings illustrate that students' understanding of syntactic rules in Indonesian still requires more attention. As a step for improvement, the author provides several suggestions, including restructuring sentences to make them more effective, adding missing sentence elements, and using conjunctions in accordance with scientific writing guidelines. This study is expected to be used as a source of evaluation to improve the quality of students' scientific writing in the future.