Thursday, July 06, 2006

this is a test

In a job interview yesterday, an editor scrawled on a piece of paper his editing test for me. I have been staring at this paper since then, and although it seems strangely familiar to me, I can not for the life of me figure it out.

So here it is:

On a blank piece of paper, he wrote this:
"There are three errors in this sentance.
1.
2.
3."

OK, first I can see he did spell "sentance" wrong, so that's one. But are there others? I, of course, Googled it, and came up with similar versions of the test, that indeed had additional errors - one had "error" spelled wrong and the other had "is" rather than "are." Then I guess the third error is that there are only two errors. Christ.

So I am beginning to think this editor made a mistake. But considering I am trying to impress this guy, I am not so willing to concede. Dang.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Alabama, sorry the intial help (well, whoever was signed into Google chat) included me and Keating. That's certainly sending in the retard squad to a job for which it is not qualified...

Anonymous said...

I'm going to go out on a limb. I think the three errors are this.
1. spelling of "sentance"
2. "errors" is in the sentence, literally the word is part of the sentence
3. that's two, not three, so the sentence is incorrect.

But I could be overthinking this. Oh, and that's assuming the quotation mark before "There" was not part of what he wrote, because if you have open quotes you have to have closed quotes and the closed.