March 14, 1984

Because of an editing error, a Washington dispatch yesterday on aid for El Salvador omitted several words from remarks President Reagan made during a visit to an elementary school and added one. In answering a child's question on what Mr. Reagan does at the White House, the President replied, ''There are a lot of people who have been asking that.''

MONTAUK, L.I. THE weather was shivering cold. Gulls were swooping low over the stern. The fishing boat Donna Lee was under way well offshore, and the nets in its wake were dragging the bottom of Long Island Sound. The Montauk light was a beckoning beacon ahead. All of a sudden the dragger, as the Donna Lee is known, slowed and the midship winches were set in grinding motion. Moments later the nets were reeled aboard, and momentarily the boat's deck was awash with a teeming, writhing, flopping mass of fish and shellfish. With great precision, the deckhands sorted out the haul. Using their hands and grappling hooks they selected 1 fish for the market and tossed 2 back into the water; take 2, toss 10; take 3, toss a dozen. The ''takes'' commonly turn up on restaurant and home tables - sole, flounder, sea scallops, bluefish, but terfish and fluke. Those tossed back were what the Donna Lee's skipper, a 31-year- old German-born fisherman named Bill Grimm, called ''no sales,'' fish that are by and large rejected by the American public. These fish are, incredibly, referred to by seafood merchants and fishermen alike as ''trash.''

In the crucial primary battles between Gary Hart and Walter F. Mondale yesterday, the election returns followed the pattern of the economy, state by state. Prosperity favored Senator Hart and adversity Mr. Mondale. The former Vice President, wounded by a string of primary defeats in the past fortnight, won decisively in Alabama, a state with 12.3 percent unemployment and the largest share of voters complaining that their family financial fortunes were worse now than a year ago, according to The New York Times/CBS News Polls. Massachusetts, Florida and Rhode Island, the three primaries won solidly by Senator Hart, all show only about 6 percent unemployment, below the national average. With the economy a less acute concern in Massachusetts, the poll there found many more people saying they were better off than worse off economically, and more people cited the nuclear arms race than any single economic issue as the most decisive issue in their vote. That worked in Mr. Hart's favor.

An article in Sports Pages yesterday about Temple University incorrectly cited the last year its basketball team qualified for the N.C.A.A.'s championship tournament. It was 1979.

''The church is not turning back.'' - Bishop Jan Mazur of Siedlce, Poland.