I might be dating myself here, but when I was a teenager lots of newspapers and magazines carried adverts asking variants of “Could yuo be a proofraeder?” You would send away and get back a printed sheet asking you to find a certain number of mistakes, with details of courses you could do if you scored well.
Hansard uses something similar in the early stages of our application process. When you go to fill in your form, you’ll see that there’s a proofreading test to download and edit. Mine was on the Licensing Acts—it gave me plenty of opportunities to use licence, license and licensing correctly.
What are we looking for?
We’re not looking to catch you out. We don’t expect you to have read all our work and absorbed our style guide. But we are interested in how you use English, and in how good you are at spotting a host of errors.
You might choose to edit the document, or to use track changes. Both approaches are fine, but make sure that as well as finding the errors you let us know what you’d replace them with. Don’t just highlight them and leave us to guess.
Spelling, punctuation and grammar
This is key. Do you know your way around a dictionary? Do you know what the various punctuation marks do and when to use them? Or when capitalising a word changes its meaning? Do you know about English’s secret rules of word order?
Question everything—if something doesn’t look right, do a bit of digging. You’ll probably get the majority of these errors on your first read through, but some of them are deliberately difficult.
Checking the facts
Hansard reporters are cracking pub quizzers, but we don’t expect everyone to know everything. We’re not changing the facts; part of our remit is correcting obvious mistakes, so that everyone understands the same thing. We do expect you to know how to weigh sources against each other and choose a good one, and there will be several fact errors within the text.
We expect you to have to research the answers using whichever tools you prefer, but always use the results wisely and with thought.
Consistency and appearance
Like any publication, it’s important to us that our output fits together well. We have a style guide to make sure that we know what to capitalise, when to use quotation marks or italics and when to use certain spellings when more than one option is available. We also use certain fonts and have rules for paragraph spacing or indenting.
As I say, you don’t need to know our style. But if you see any variation in spelling, formatting or presentation, you need to think about how to make the content of the test consistent throughout. Choose your favourite and run with it.
Have a go!
There are 10 errors in the extract below. Can you find all of them? Answers can be found lower down the page.
Have you ever thought about weight training? Perhaps it makes you think of Arnold Schwarzeneger in his hay day or worlds strongest man contestants placing rocks onto plinths?
But using resistance in your workout improves cognitive fucntion, boosts your immune system and lowers blood sugar; there is also evidence that maintaining mussel mass is a good indicator of longetivity. Women in particular as taking up strength work to help combat menopause and ageing; it can help to prevent teh process that makes bones thinner as well as supporting the body.
A recent BBC article how tells Trish Tenn from Cheltenham has recently started lifting weights again and won the British Masters competition in 2024, returning from a 270-year break after starting her career in 1986. Anyone can try the sport and you might find it is your dream work out. Why not have a go?
You’re ready to go – why not go to the job vacancy and take the first step in your career with Hansard?
Errors:
- Arnold Schwarzeneger should be Arnold Schwarzenegger
- Hay day should be heyday
- Missing apostrophe in world’s strongest man
- Typo in function
- mussel mass should be muscle mass
- Longetivity should be longevity
- As taking should be are taking
- Teh process should be the process
- 270 should be 27
- Work out/workout should be consistent
(NB - You might think that starting a sentence with But is an error, and some would argue that it is, but it’s not the sort of thing we’re looking for in our tests as there are times where it is appropriate for immediacy or pace.)