Let’s be completely honest about Section A of Paper 1: the Editing section is a fast, high-stakes 10 marks. Because you are under intense time pressure on exam day, it is incredibly tempting to just read the passage silently in your head and change whatever “sounds a bit weird”.
That is exactly what the examiners are banking on.
O-Level editing passages are brilliant because they are intentionally written to sound perfectly normal on a casual read. The examiners know exactly where Singaporean students make everyday errors in speech, and they hide those exact grammatical errors in plain sight. If you rely entirely on your ear, you are walking straight into a trap.
To secure a perfect 10/10, you need to stop guessing and start scanning like a detective. This guide gives you eight grammar traps to check every single time, along with clear examples of what each error looks like and how to fix it.
To make a simple singular subject look plural, examiners will purposely cram a long, descriptive phrase between the subject and the verb.
The Trap: The teacher, along with all thirty of her secondary school students, were celebrating the end of the examination.
Why it tricks you: Your ear hears “students were” right next to each other and thinks it is flawless.
The Fix: Ignore everything inside the commas. The real subject is the single teacher. The line should be: was celebrating.
A passage should maintain a consistent timeline throughout unless there is a clear, logical reason to shift. Unnecessary tense jumps are one of the most common errors planted in Section A.
The Trap: She walked into the room, dropped her heavy school bag on the floor, and looks around nervously.
Why it tricks you: Because the action is happening fast, your brain accepts the present tense verb “looks” without pausing.
The Fix: Identify the dominant tense of the passage before editing. Since the sentence starts in the past tense (“walked”, “dropped”), the final verb must match. The line should be: looked around nervously.
Prepositions (in, on, at, for, by, with, of) show relationships between words. These are incredibly hard to master because their usage is governed entirely by convention rather than strict logic.
The Trap: After school, my classmates and I were waiting on the school bus for over an hour.
Why it tricks you: The incorrect version sounds completely acceptable because we hear it frequently in everyday casual conversations.
The Fix: Learn common word pairings (collocations) through reading. We wait on a platform, but we wait for a bus. The line should be: waiting for the school bus.
Examiners love to hide errors behind tricky vowel sounds rather than just vowel letters.
The Trap: My elder sister is proud to be an university student studying English pedagogy.
Why it tricks you: Your brain sees the vowel letter “U” and automatically applies the standard “an” rule without thinking.
The Fix: Base your article on the spoken sound, not the spelling. Words like university, uniform, and unique actually begin with a consonant “Y” sound (“yoo-ni-ver-si-ty”). The line should be: a university student.
This trap targets adjectives that describe feelings. Examiners love to swap present participles (-ing) with past participles (-ed) to see if you can tell the difference.
The Trap: After an exhausting nine-hour flight back to Singapore, the student volunteers were completely tiring.
Why it tricks you: Both words look like normal descriptors, so your eyes glide right past them during a fast read.
The Fix: Remember the core rule: -ing causes the feeling, while -ed experiences the feeling. The flight was exhausting (caused the fatigue), so the volunteers felt tired (experienced the fatigue).
Relative pronouns (who, which, whose, where, when) connect clauses together. Examiners will intentionally cross the wires by matching the wrong pronoun to its noun.
The Trap: This is the exact secondary school which my elder sister graduated from four years ago.
Why it tricks you: We use the word “which” casually for almost everything in daily speech, so it rarely triggers an alarm.
The Fix: Look closely at the noun being modified. If it is a specific institution acting as a physical location, you must use where (or from which). The line should be: school where my elder sister…
In Singapore, we frequently pluralize words in daily conversation that are strictly uncountable in formal English.
The Trap: The school counselor provided us with several useful feedbacks on our narrative essay writing.
Why it tricks you: Since you received multiple pieces of advice, adding an “s” feels completely logical to your brain.
The Fix: Abstract nouns like feedback, information, equipment, luggage, and furniture can never take a plural “s”. The line should simply be: feedback.
Examiners love to slip double modifiers into a line to see if you spot the redundancy.
The Trap: With fewer cars on the road during the holidays, our commute to the library today was more faster than usual.
Why it tricks you: Stacking modifiers makes the sentence sound extra descriptive, so your brain glides right past the extra word.
The Fix: Because the adjective “faster” is already in its comparative form, the word “more” is completely incorrect. To fix this using a single-word replacement, you must change the word “more” to an intensifier like much. The line should be: much faster than usual.
Unlike essay writing where marks depend on creativity and argument quality, every single mark in the Editing component is fully within your control. The errors are predictable, the patterns repeat across papers, and the checklist above covers the vast majority of what you will encounter.
The students who score full marks in Editing are not the ones with perfect grammar instincts. They are the ones who slow down, read carefully, and check systematically rather than trusting their first impression of whether a sentence sounds right.
At WRITERS AT WORK, our Secondary English programme includes targeted Editing practice designed to train students to spot grammar errors quickly and accurately under exam conditions. Drop us a message today to find out how we can support your O-Level preparation, and follow us on TikTok and Facebook for regular grammar tips, exam strategies, and a closer look at what goes on inside our classrooms.
Remember that out of the 10 numbered lines, two lines are completely correct and require no changes. If you have thoroughly checked a line against your grammar checklist and it is flawless, simply put a tick according to your exam paper’s instructions.
No. The O-Level exam format requires a single-word replacement for every error line.
Yes, always. Reading the full passage first gives you two important pieces of information before you start making any changes. It tells you the dominant tense of the passage, which is essential for spotting tense consistency errors. It also gives you the context of the passage, which helps you understand the meaning well enough to notice when a word feels grammatically out of place.
Start practising and learning
