Writing Samples to Help You Practice Proofreading

At Knowadays, we love to help you improve your proofreading skills. So today, we’re giving you three short passages of text to practice on. They are written in American English.

Just copy and paste each passage into a Microsoft Word document and make any changes you feel are necessary (focusing on clear errors rather than style, phrasing, etc., for this exercise). After that, you can compare the changes you made to our suggestions further down the page.

Some of the errors in this passage suggest that the author’s first language may not be English. In some places, for example, the author has separated single words into two parts (e.g., any one). There are also places where the noun and verb disagree (e.g., some book recommend) and some misused prepositions (e.g., to your disposal). These are common errors among writers who speak English as an additional language.

Here, the author has cited their meticulous attention to detail, but they have also made some noticeable mistakes. These include using insure to mean ensure, redundancy (i.e., using the percent symbol and the word percent together), confusing the words modern (i.e., up to date) and modernist (i.e., related to modernism), a homophone-based error where manor and manner were mixed up, and an unnecessary comma plus repetition of and in the final sentence. Such errors would undermine the author’s message, so they will need to be corrected!

This passage misused hyphens in various places. One key issue is the hyphenation of well-known: this is fine when the word precedes the term it is modifying (i.e., “well-known” facts). But this term is not hyphenated otherwise, so we have removed the hyphen when it is used in the sentence starting It is well known that children… in this passage.

Another interesting case is the use of less in place of fewer. This traditional “error” is now so widespread that it is considered acceptable in some situations (e.g., on signs for checkout lines saying 10 items or less). But in formal writing, such as an essay, it would need correcting.

There were also some typos (e.g., misspelling solely as soley; use of a hyphen in place of a parenthetical en dash; the misspelling of separate; the confusion of except and expect). And there were two sentences where articles were missing (e.g., inasmuch as picture and but at image).

How did you do? Did your edits match the ones we’ve provided above? Of course, in some cases, there are other changes that could have been made to address the issues in the text: e.g., rather than adding an apostrophe after years in ten years experience, we could have rephrased to say ten years of experience. But as long as you identified the problems and made relevant changes, you’ll have done the job required!

For more practice passages and a wealth of information about proofreading, try our Becoming A Proofreader course. With a free trial available, you can start learning today. See how Becoming A Proofreader could help you develop a rewarding career in proofreading!