ABSTRACT
Appropriately enough, this is the last section of the Core Element. Nothing annoys a marker more than an essay full of careless errors. It is your responsibility to check for presentational mistakes before you hand your work in. Check everything: spelling, punctuation, referencing, the lot. What follows is a passage from a carelessly prepared essay. Find and mark as many errors as you can, and then see where you stand as a proofreader on the scale given below.
Our attitudes to animals begin to form when we are very young, and they dominated by the fact that we begin to eat meat at a very early age (1). Interestingly enough, many children at first refuse to eat animal flesh, and only became accustomed to it after strenuos efforts by there parents, who mistakenly believe it is neccesary for good health. What ever the childs initial reaction, however, the point to notice that we eat animal flesh long before we are capable of understanding that what we eat is the body of a dead amimal (2). Thus we never make a consciuos, enformed decision, free from bias that enforms any long-established habit, re-inforced by all the pressures of social conformity, not to animal flesh. At the same time, children have a natural love of animals, and our society encourages them to affectionate towards pets and cuddly stuffed toy animals. From these facts stem the most distictive characteristic of the attitude of children in our society to animals – namely, that there is not infact one unified attitude to animals, but two conflicting attitudes which co-exist in one individual, carefully segregated so that the inherant contravention between them rarely causes trouble (4).
