Missing Percentage Sign: Lexical Error or Something Else?

[Winnie1122]

What type of error is the omission of the percentage sign in “… is 22 higher than …”? Can it be classified as a lexical error?

 

[5jj]

Do you mean the percentage sign should be here: “… is 22% higher than …”?

If so, this is a typo(graphical error).

 

[Winnie1122]

I really appreciate your help, thank you!
But in the assessment criteria, there are only lexical, grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors. Doesn’t the % symbol function as a lexical unit that conveys meaning? Without it, a number could be interpreted in different ways. So, should its omission in a student’s essay be considered a lexical error?

 

[probus]

I'm no linguist, but if you look up "lexical' in OneLook it is a term that pertains to words, not symbols like %. However, you are right that either the symbol % or the word percent is needed there.

 

[jutfrank]

I think that you haven't given us enough background context to say with any degree of confidence what was going through, or not going through, the writer's mind. It could well be, for example, that the writer simply forgot to include the percentage symbol, either at the time of writing the sentence or when reading the text back, in which case I'd call that an editing error, or a typo, as was mentioned in post #2.

It isn't easy to imagine a writer making no conceptual distinction between the number 22 and the percentage 22%, but if the context were, say, a response to an IELTS writing task where the candidate must describe data expressed on a graph, it could be quite possible to be confused between numbers and percentages.