Editing Practice

Edit and rewrite the following paragraph. Look for problems in the following:

• verb tenses
• verb + gerund/infinitive
• modals
• subject verb agreement
• passive voice
• singular and plural
• sentence connectors
• relative clauses
• pronouns and nouns
• indefinite pronouns: someone anyone
• punctuation
• word forms

1		Predicting the future is an almost impossible job. There are too many unknown factors, so its extremely difficult to be correct if you are looking more than five or ten years into the future. For example, forty years ago, I remember to read that, by the 1980's we will all have picture-phones. These predicted to be telephones transmitted pictures as well sound. Well, there are a few devices today that do so, but they did not exist in the 1980's and they are hardly everyday appliances in everyone's homes today. About twenty-five years ago I remember reading a prediction by the year 2000 we would have many new transportation. One of these was jet belts that you will wear around your waist and fly you to different destinations. Another was small one and two person cars will glide above the ground on a cushion of air. Neither of these inventions are available where I live, and I didn't see them anywhere else either. Than there are the things that exist today that no one predicted. For example, computers. Well, someone, somewhere might predict personal computers, laptops and handheld devices but I never hear or read about them. In fact, when Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, said that he was going to start build and sell personal computers, people thought he was crazy. At that point, computers were huge mainframes that only computer scientists could use them. Anybody but Jobs thought that ordinary people might be able to, or even want to, use one. Even though predicting is a risk business, it's still useful. It fuels our imagination for a world that will be, and reminds us that even if we don't know exactly that's coming, we know that anything is.