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Graduates need to brush up on their written skills, a new report claims.

The Queen's English Society has published a journal showing a list of 75 spelling, grammar and punctuation errors made by 75 second and final year students.

It shows that one UK-born, UK-educated student who has just been awarded a first-class degree wrote: "It initats a undisired non-specific response in mamammals," according to the Guardian.

'Herd' instead of 'heard', 'fourth' instead of 'forth' and a failure to distinguish between 'to', 'too' and 'too' were among other common mistakes.

Dr Bernard Lamb, who kept a diary of errors made by students on his genetics programme at Imperial College, said: "I correct them but they still get it wrong. They haven't been trained to be accurate.

"They haven't been corrected and a lot of them don't even think it's important.

"This year I just found the errors were so frequent I wanted to get publicity to put pressure on the education establishment."

Mr Lamb added that he had spoken to a tutor at Oxford University who had complained about poor grammar among students.

He also admitted that his own command of English was once bad - until, apparently, a Sri Lankan research student pointed out the errors of his ways.

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