Test yourself

Page owner: Professional standards director

Anyone can be a proofreader, can't they? How hard can it be? All they do is find typos, don't they?

See for yourself!

If you're thinking of training to become a proofreader, or if you're just curious, here's a chance to see whether you would enjoy some of the things that editors and proofreaders do.

It's based on straightforward text that contains a number of very common errors. See if you can spot all twenty errors, then check the answer sheet. If you haven't found everything, that doesn't mean that you won't be a good proofreader: it takes training and experience to do it well, and the CIEP can help.

Take the test (118KB PDF) See the answers (130KB PDF)

Take our quizzes just for fun!

Challenge yourself to take our language quizzes. They're just for fun but you'll test your knowledge of grammar and current usage, and we'll explain what we think are the right answers. There's a new one every two months, so check back here when you want to tackle the next one.

  • Quiz 1: Punctuation
  • Quiz 2: Language use
  • Quiz 3: Spellings, phrases and punctuation
  • Quiz 4: More punctuation, dashes and hyphens
  • Quiz 5: Spooky Halloween-themed language dilemmas
  • Quiz 6: Fa-la-la-la, it's a festive one
  • Quiz 7: Pluralisation, superfluities and easily confused words
  • Quiz 8: Numbers, names, italics and accents
  • Quiz 9: Getting into summer with subjunctives, pronouns and more
  • Quiz 10: All about publishing terminology
  • Quiz 11: Parenthesis, capitalisation and ampersands, with a sprinkling of dogs, bats and stars
  • Quiz 12: Santa, Charles Dickens and cheese. It must be another festive edition!
  • Quiz 13: To-ing and fro-ing with titles, numbers and italics
  • Quiz 14: Verbs, references, Star Wars and Pringles
  • Quiz 15: Adverbs, possessives and word definitions, with crisps and cosy crime
  • Quiz 16: Internal dialogue, interjections, and interruptions by leopards in this fiction-themed edition
  • Quiz 17: Another quiz for Halloween (or should that be Hallowe'en?)
  • Quiz 18: From reindeer to superheroes, apostrophes to false ranges
  • Quiz 19: Slashes, flares and portmanteaus
  • Quiz 20: Aluminium, cheese footballs and a not-so-silent ‘h’
  • Quiz 21: Are things going downhill or uphill? Plus school holidays, Pulitzer Prizes and the complicated letter C
  • Quiz 22: Sleepy cats and suncream, word endings and Westward Ho!
  • Quiz 23: From football excitement to citing right