Proofreading the Concert Notice
A pupil is proofreading the notice below before it is photocopied for 120 families. The teacher has said there are seven errors and that each one is either a spelling error, an apostrophe error, a punctuation error or a wrong word. The notice must be ready before the 3:00 p.m. bell and cannot be reprinted once copied.
NOTICE
The Grade 6 concert will be held on Thursday 12 June at 5:00 pm, parents should arrive early to get a seat. All students must bring there costumes by Wednesday. Students who recieve a permission letter should return it to the office. The choir will sing two seperate songs before the interval. Ticket's cost $200 each and can be bought at the school gate. We are definately looking forward to seeing you. Its going to be a wonderful evening.
1. List each error, its correction, and its type (spelling, apostrophe, punctuation, or wrong word).
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| # | As printed | Correction | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 5:00 pm, parents should arrive | 5:00 pm. Parents should arrive | punctuation (comma splice) |
| 2 | there costumes | their costumes | wrong word (homophone) |
| 3 | recieve | receive | spelling (i before e except after c) |
| 4 | seperate | separate | spelling (the middle is par, as in a part) |
| 5 | Ticket's cost | Tickets cost | apostrophe (plural, not possessive) |
| 6 | definately | definitely | spelling (from finite) |
| 7 | Its going to be | It's going to be | apostrophe (contraction of it is) |
Checking method: read once for meaning, then once for spelling alone, then once for punctuation alone. A proof-reader who hunts for everything at once reliably misses items - and notice that five of the seven are in the small words, not the long ones.
2. Explain the rule that decides between 'its' and 'it's', and give one example of each that does not appear in the notice.
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The rule: it's is always a contraction of it is or it has; its is the possessive form, meaning belonging to it. Unlike possessive nouns, possessive pronouns never take an apostrophe - his, hers, ours, theirs, its. So the apostrophe marks a missing letter, never ownership.
The test: say the sentence aloud with it is substituted. If it still makes sense, use it's. If not, use its.
Examples:
- It's - It's raining on the field, so the match will start late. (It is raining works, so the apostrophe is correct.)
- its - The dog wagged its tail when the gate opened. (The dog wagged it is tail fails, so no apostrophe.)
Applying it to the notice: Its going to be a wonderful evening becomes It is going to be..., which is grammatical, so the apostrophe is required. The very same test applied to Ticket's cost $200 gives Ticket is cost $200, which fails - so the apostrophe is wrong there, and the form needed is the plain plural Tickets. One test resolves both items.
3. Rewrite the first sentence of the notice so that it is no longer a comma splice, using two different methods. Then explain why the original punctuation misleads a reader.
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Original: The Grade 6 concert will be held on Thursday 12 June at 5:00 pm, parents should arrive early to get a seat.
Method 1 - full stop and capital letter: The Grade 6 concert will be held on Thursday 12 June at 5:00 pm. Parents should arrive early to get a seat.
Method 2 - semicolon: The Grade 6 concert will be held on Thursday 12 June at 5:00 pm; parents should arrive early to get a seat.
Method 3 (also acceptable) - conjunction: The Grade 6 concert will be held on Thursday 12 June at 5:00 pm, so parents should arrive early to get a seat.
Why the original misleads: both halves could stand alone as sentences, and a comma is too weak a mark to hold two such clauses together. A reader moving quickly - which is exactly how a notice is read - reaches parents should arrive early and expects it to complete the thought about the concert's timing, so the instruction arrives as a jolt. Worse, the comma allows the two ideas to blur into one long line when they are separate instructions. In a notice, the full stop is doing real work: it separates the announcement from the request.