“The Indian Express in association with The British Council presents another initiative “Learn English”.

There will be a series of 36 articles appearing in the Quest page every thursday. This is the 15th episode in the series of 36.There are also exciting prizes to be won. You can collect upto 26 articles and send it back to us in a scrapbook format.

The best four entries will win:

* 2 Free Adult courses (For classesVIII to XII) of 32 hours’ duration.

* 2 Free Young Learners Courses (For classes IV to VII) of 16 hours’ duration.

The courses are offered only at The British Council English Language

Teaching Centre, Delhi .

For more details of the courses please visit www.britishcouncil.org/india”

By Keith Sands

This paragraph is not ordinary. Look at it. At first, it won’t look too odd. Just a normal paragraph — you may think. But look at it again and you might find it a bit unusual. Just a tiny bit. What's wrong with it, you may ask? Nothing wrong at all, in fact, as I said, it’s just slightly unusual. It’s difficult to put it in words. Look again. Is anything not right? Can you spot it? Is anything . . . missing?

What you’ve just read is a lipogram — a text written without using a particular letter of the alphabet. It’s the hardest kind of lipogram, as it doesn’t contain the letter E — the most common letter in the English language. Try writing one yourself, even a few sentences, and you'll see it’s pretty difficult. Now imagine the task faced by the French writer Georges Perec, when a friend challenged him to write a whole novel without using E — a letter that is even more common in French than in English.

... contd.