Test your editing skills

Proofread and correct these examples from United Nations writings.

The United Nations and most international organizations in the UN system use the Editorial Manual online.

AI tools won’t help you much to avoid stylistic errors, as they don’t distinguish enough between styles. If it’s important for you or you’re a proofreader, PerfectIt looks for errors and inconsistencies for UN and WHO style.

Capitalization, spelling, numbers

Correct these errors and bring them into United Nations style:

1. Outreach Strategy “ Telling Our Story”  [this is a subheading]      
2. The purpose is to provide support to the Technical Departments in close consultation with Regional Offices.
3. The agenda addressed the following topics:
   -Donor Agreements from drafting the agreement to reporting
   -Compliance related issues
   -Business Management System overview – Finance, Award Management and Expenditure Batch
   -Staff Health Insurance Briefings
4. … in the city center of Delhi
5. … the genomic sequencing capacity in the public health sector remains under-developed with just 4 Countries having the capacity to perform sequencing …
6. Are they ready to raise their game, shift gears from 2 to 6 within a couple of weeks …
7. … being labeled as incompetent, falling out of favor from senior management …
8. In terms of additional skills and behavioral attributes …

Answer key

1. No capitals in subheadings: Outreach strategy “ Telling our story”            
2. No capitals in plurals: technical departments in close consultation with regional offices.
3. Wrong use of capital letters, non-UK spelling and a missing hyphen:
   -Donor agreements
   -Compliance-related issues
   -Business management system overview – finance, award management and expenditure batch
   -Staff health insurance briefings
4. Non-UK spelling: centre
5. Number and capitalization [write out numbers under 10]: four countries
6. Numbers [write out numbers under 10]: from two to six
7. Non-UK spelling: labelled, favour
8. Non-UK spelling: behavioural

________________________________________________
Author: Carol Waites

Presentation/editing by Christina O’Shaughnessy 
https://worldwidewriting.org/

________________________________________________
Carol Waites (PhD)
Email: carolswritingtips@gmail.com
For more writing tips, consult my website:
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Carol’s memoir of her times at the United Nations, Behind the Flags, is available on Amazon and lulu.com

ISBN 9783952632703 Behind the Flags Amazon
9783952632710 Behind the Flags Black and White Version Amazon (Australia and Japan)
9783952632727 Behind the Flags lulu.com

It is also available for sale at Payot and in the UN bookshop at the Pregny entry in Geneva.