Error Analysis of Interoffice Correspondence of Selected MSU Offices

Abstract

The study attempted to perform an error analysis, that is to identify and analyze the linguistics errors found in the four (4) corpora of interoffice correspondence which consist of memorandums, special orders, cover letters, and endorsements of the three (3) selected offices of the Mindanao State University, Marawi City, namely, Office of the President, Office of the Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs, and the Graduate School during the calendar year 2005, 2006. This paper used the qualitative-descriptive method. To reveal the anticipated outcomes the inductive data analysis was employed. When all of the sources were gathered, the individual texts were subjected to error analysis primarily focused on linguistic errors. These errors were categorized first as local and global errors, and to render error taxonomy more specific for analytic purposes, local and global errors were further classified into three linguistic categories, namely, lexical, syntactic, and morphological. The findings of this study show that the errors found in the corpora of interoffice correspondence are manifestations that even at their level, writers of the said communications are not free from committing these errors. However, these errors were attributed to Other Errors for they could not be readily pigeonholed; they could very well be developmental, interlingual, or ambiguous errors. They could not be due to lack of competence since these communications were written by professionals who have been using the language, hence, warranting the confidence or assumption that they have enough exposure to it.