This study deals with error analysis on students’ essays. This study
focused on grammatical errors which include tenses (verb forms), number
agreement, and active-passive voice, word order, and word formation. Those
categories are chosen since the writer who had become a writing assistant for
writing classes noticed that the students tent to have problems with the categories
compared to the other grammatical problems such as punctuation. In addition,
grammatical errors refer to any violation to Standard English Grammar (Dulay,
Burt, & Krashen, 1982). The purpose of this study is to find out the types of errors
committed by the students in Written English 4 class. There are five error
categories employed in this research which are addition, omission, misformation,
misordering (Dulay, Burt, & Krashen, 1982), and blends (James, 1998).
Furthermore, the writer took 12 essays as the source of data, and listed all errors
found in those essays. The writer found that the most frequent error is
misformation, especially the misformation of verbs and nouns. In conclusion, both
teachers and students should improve their teaching and learning process.