Monday, January 19, 2009

Try your hand at copyediting

Gene Weingarten, journalist and humor writer, published a column in the Washington Post last June expounding the irrelevance of the modern copyeditor.

The column contains "57 errors of fact, grammar, syntax and style," indicating that Weingarten's stance is somewhat ironic. He concludes with the sentence, "We'll miss ya, guys, even if we didn't need you all that muck," and an invitation to the reader to catch the errors. Try it out- it's good practice, and the answers are all at the bottom of the page.
Some of problems are common sense, like the redundancy in "automated ATM machines," while others are more subtle, and might require reference to a dictionary or style manual.

Speaking of which, I'm planning on writing a series about editing reference books and books on editing, coming soon. Get excited!

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