Have you ever wondered how students develop certain habits?

I have a standard writing guide I have used for years and it includes specific examples of what I do and don't want to see. I make small revisions as necessary, but in the last year or two, I find myself needing to add quite a few more reminders of what not to do. What's really interesting is I see the same error repeatedly, despite the fact that students come from many feeder schools. A couple of years ago I had to start asking, when doing any type of narrative writing, for students to please not use convenient devices such as "suddenly," "out of nowhere," or "all of a sudden," and to please not begin with "One day," or end with "It was all a dream," or "Then I woke up." Last year I was taken aback by what I now term "the dreaded also comma." The number of fragments created by using also as the first word of a sentence, followed by a comma, was (and is again this year) amazing. I have already seen the continuation of several other trends: infront of (I don't know why students are putting in and front together as a single word -- gosh, why not include of and run the entire multi-word preposition together?), starting sentences with and or but (which I always thought was fairly verboten), and the widespread inability to spell tries, tried, or trying. Again, this isn't a matter of young writers making mistakes, which is to be expected; it's how certain ones crop up, in large numbers, errors that in the past were not frequent enough to be on my radar screen. One excellent source for bringing common writing errors to the attention of students is a book from the Cottonwood Press about English Teachers' Pet Peeves. It has one or two I haven't seen as a prevalent issue, and it lacks one or two I would have included, but overall it's an excellent source, and like most Cottonwood Press publications, a lot of fun with a sense of humor young writers appreciate.