Editing Practice "Warmup" Exercise No. 1

What's wrong with this sentence?

Each of the following sentences has a common first draft writing error in it. Working together in your editing groups, identify and correct the error in each sentence and decide how would you correct the error as an editor. There may be more than one occurrence of the same kind of error in a sentence. What exactly would you write on the paper to describe the mistake for the benefit of your author? As a group reach agreement on what shorthand common editing abbreviations you would use.

1. Entoptic images can usually be seen during altared states of consciousness.

2. During the 1970's Ronald Siegel did research with test subjects who took hallucinogens. His subjects are perceiving different entoptics and complex visual images during these experiments.

3. A hallucination can be defined as a "false sensory perception in the absence of an actual external stimulus" (Siegel, 1977, page 132).

4. Hallucinations can be induced by a long list of conditions (Siegel 1977, p.132).

5. A review of 500 LSD hallucinations indicated that 72 percent of the subjects reported seeing religious symbols and images and 49 percent reported images of small animals and human beings (Siegel, 1977, pages 132-133).

6. In the early stages of hallucination black-and-white images "take on a blue hues", become "more organized", and become "more organized and pulsating" (Siegel, 1977, p. 136).

7. Migraine sufferers often see entoptic images such as "lines, grids, concentric circles and the 'fortification illusion,' which is a horse-shoe-shaped area consisting of bright zigzag lines appearing at an expanding outer edge." (Siegel, 1977, p. 139)

8. A really cool pulsating and rotating spiraling tunnel is a common hallucinatory image (Siegel, 1977, p. 135).

9. Test subjects in the third stage of altered states of consciousness couldn't tell that their bodily transformations weren't real.

10. According to Siegel (1977) the patterns in the weaving and art of the Huichol Indians is "virtually identical" to the reported images that from taking peyote (pp. 138-39).

11. Entoptics are typical of a stage one hallucination, rapidly changing iconic images are typical of a stage two hallucination.