Your mission is to copy-edit the text below. There are at least 22 errors, including misspellings, words out of order, words missing, and so on. The answers are on page 402, but don’t peek until you’ve done the exercise.
Copy-editing is one of most the important jobs in professional writing.
You could think of the copy editor as a hunter, hidden in the foliage, waiting for their pray—a spelling mistake, a grammatical or punctuation error, a problem in wording—to appear. Then, he or she pounce and—lo!—the error no is more it is just as satisfying to take an immoderate spew of verbaige and, with a few streaks of the keyboard, create instead a measured flow of words. The copy editor may also redact five poorly chosen words to two or three, do we really have to say “in regard to” when we mean “about”. But the copy editor be must also carefull. Too much editing may distract from the meaning the writer is not trying to get across and even introduce new errors. Finally the copy editor performs what can only be called a noble role in the perservation of proper English. Writers, even good ones, are constantly trying to change language by braking the rules of grammar and by concieving new spellings or even entirely new words (words like “neologism” which means “the practice of creating new words”). Copy editors are the line last of defense against error and these barbaric practices. In other words, copy editors are the last bastion of civiliized discourse. May that bastion stand forever!