Sunday 23 January 2011

How good are your proof reading skills?

The monthly magazine 'Writers' Forum' provide a little exercise in each edition of their publication to test how good their reader's proof reading skills are. See how you get on! The extract from Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days below has 20 errors in it. Can you spot them?!!


In the year 1872, No.7 Savile Row, Burlington Gardens - the house where Sheridan died in 814 - was occupied by Phileas Fogg, Esq. This gentleman was one of the most remarkable and in deed most remarked upon, members of the Reform Club, although he seemed to go out of his way todo nothing what might attract any attention.


One of the greatest pubic speakers to honour his country had thus been replaced by the aforesaid Phileas Fogg. The latter was an enigmatic figure about who nothing was known, except that he was a through gentleman and one of the most handsomest figures in the hole of high society.


He was said to look like Byron: his head at least, for his feet were beyond reproach - but a mustachoed and bewhiskered Byron, an impassive Bryon, one who might have lived for a thousand years without ever growin gold.



Although clearly British, Mr Fogg might not have been a Londoner. He had never been potted in the Stock Exchange, the Bank, or the City. The Basins and docks of London had never birthed a ship for an owner called Phileas Fogg. This gentleman was not on any board of directors His name had never rang out in a barristers' chambers, wether at the Temple, Lincoln's Inn, or Gray's Inn. He had never pleaded in the Courts of Chancery, Quenn's Bench, or Exchequer, nor in an Ecclesastical Court. He was not engaged in industry, busness, commerce or agriculture.

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