Find the Error 59
(Extract adapted from a national training company's quarterly newsletter)
What kind of mistake do you see? (Choose one:)
- apostrophes
- articles
- doesn't make sense
- punctuation
- singular / plural
- spelling
Answer: doesn't make sense
There is a stray 'everyone' in the third sentence of this piece of text. The third
sentence should begin: 'Everyone at People Power plays an enormously
important role in helping ordinary people …' This mistake may have been
made when the author was editing the piece, although if they had spent just a
few minutes checking their work carefully after creating it, rather than hastily
publishing it, they would probably have spotted the unnecessary word. This
newsletter would have been distributed to many different offices of the same
national training company. Potentially several thousand employees would
have received a copy. Whether they read it or not is another matter, but
wouldn't it have been better to spend those extra few minutes checking for
that stray 'everyone'? We all make mistakes when producing written work.
We make some because we are not sure how to use certain punctuation
marks and others because we are unclear about a particular grammar rule.
But we can all eliminate the majority of our mistakes – the 'little mistakes', like
the one in this example – if we spend time learning about the kind of mistakes
that we make and take just ten minutes to check what we've written – to
proof-read our work – before we publish it and make it accessible for a wider
audience.
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