Source: Ma douce Filleule Déli-cat....., Julicath/Cath, Flickr
Now it’s time for you to practice editing by looking for errors in spelling, capitalization, and punctuation in an excerpt from the New York Times article “A Cat’s 200-Mile Trek Home Leaves Scientists Guessing” written by Pam Belluck. You will tackle one thing at a time to create a colorful proofread of this excerpt using highlighting.
Follow these steps to do the exercise:
- Click on the words that need to be capitalized. You should find 10 capitalization corrections that will highlight in blue if you are correct.
- Next, read the passage again and click on the 10 misspelled words to highlight them in pink.
- Read the excerpt a third time and click where you think punctuation is needed to highlight these 10 instances in green.
In your notes, write and correct the 10 words that either need capitalization or have capital letters that need to be lowercase. (You highlighted these in blue above.) When you’re finished, check your understanding to see possible responses. “Scientists” should be all lowercase: “scientists”
The first letter of “holly” should be uppercase: “Holly”
The first letter of “november” should be uppercase: “November”
The first letter of each word in “new year’s eve” should be uppercase: “New Year’s Eve”
The first letter of “holly” should be uppercase: “Holly”
The first letter of “Ecologist” should be lowercase: “ecologist”
The first letter of “dr.” should be uppercase: “Dr.”
The first letter in “let’s” should be uppercase: “Let’s”
The first letter in “North” should be lowercase: “north”
The first letter in “holly” should be uppercase: “Holly”
Next, in your notes, write the 10 words that are misspelled along with their correct spellings. (You highlighted these in pink above.) When you’re finished, check your understanding to see possible responses. manageing should be spelled managing
seperated should be separated
week should be weak
its should be it’s
wandered should be wondered
beleive should be believe
their should be they’re
Their should be There
comon should be common
sence should be sense
Finally, in your notes again, write the 10 instances that need punctuation. (You highlighted these in green in the article.) When you’re finished, check your understanding to see possible responses. (Hint: You should include enough words to be specific about the location of the error, but you don’t need to write entire sentences.) There should be a period after “hometown”: return to her hometown.
“Dayton Beach Fla.” needs a comma: Dayton Beach, Fla.
A comma is needed after “patterns on her fur”: patterns on her fur, but also
“Richters” needs an apostrophe: Richter’s
“Are” should have an opening quotation mark before it: “Are
“Cat” should have a question mark and a closing quotation mark after it: cat?”
There should be a comma after “strays” in this sentence: “The cats are just strays, and the people have got kind of a mental justification for expecting it to be the same cat.”
There should be a comma after “explain”: hard to explain,” said
There should be a period after “hunter”: a good hunter. I have
There should be an apostrophe after “wolves”: wolves’
There should be a closing quotation mark after “direction,”: direction,” Dr. Bateson said.
Now that you have finished finding and correcting errors, check your understanding to read a corrected version of the text.
Even scientists are baffled by how Holly, a 4-year-old tortoiseshell who in early November became separated from Jacob and Bonnie Richter at an R.V. rally in Daytona Beach, Fla., appeared on New Year’s Eve — staggering, weak and emaciated — in a backyard about a mile from the Richters’ house in West Palm Beach.
“Are you sure it’s the same cat?” wondered John Bradshaw, director of the University of Bristol’s Anthrozoology Institute. In other cases, he has suspected, “the cats are just strays, and the people have got kind of a mental justification for expecting it to be the same cat.”
…Holly not only had distinctive black-and-brown harlequin patterns on her fur, but also an implanted microchip to identify her.
“I really believe these stories, but they’re just hard to explain,” said Marc Bekoff, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Colorado. “Maybe being street-smart, maybe reading animal cues, maybe being able to read cars, maybe being a good hunter. I have no data for this.”
There is, in fact, little scientific dogma on cat navigation. Migratory animals like birds, turtles and insects have been studied more closely, and use magnetic fields, olfactory cues, or orientation by the sun.
Scientists say it is more common, although still rare, to hear of dogs returning home, perhaps suggesting, Dr. Bradshaw said, that they have inherited wolves’ ability to navigate using magnetic clues. But it’s also possible that dogs get taken on more family trips, and that lost dogs are more easily noticed or helped by people along the way.
Cats navigate well around familiar landscapes, memorizing locations by sight and smell, and easily figuring out shortcuts, Dr. Bradshaw said.
Strange, faraway locations would seem problematic, although he and Patrick Bateson, a behavioral biologist at Cambridge University, say that cats can sense smells across long distances. “Let’s say they associate the smell of pine with wind coming from the north, so they move in a southerly direction,” Dr. Bateson said.
Peter Borchelt, a New York animal behaviorist, wondered if Holly followed the Florida coast by sight or sound, tracking Interstate 95 and deciding to “keep that to the right and keep the ocean to the left.”
Congratulations! You have used a two-step strategy to proofread and revise an essay. First, you “decorated” a text with colorful highlighting, and then you corrected the errors. (By the way, did you notice the quotation marks around “decorated” for emphasis?) As you can see, proofreading after you write will help you correct errors you overlooked. Everyone makes mistakes when writing a first draft, but if you look it over and proofread for errors, you may be able to correct many of your mistakes before your teacher does.