For Teachers Recommendations on how to use Newsroom101.Com with your students This site arose from a simple need. Some journalism students need to learn better grammar, but there is no place in the curriculum to teach it. This site offers one way students can practice grammar outside of class time. There are some outstanding college grammar sites on the internet -- the OWLs, Online Writing Labs. But these are dedicated pretty much to the goals of Freshman English. They teach students how to write college essays and research papers. They usually teach MLA style and APA style. This site focuses exclusively on the needs of journalism students and journalists. Its exercises are all intended to conform to Associated Press style and standard journalistic usage. Rather than using exercises drawn from literary essays, our examples either are simple sentences designed to highlight an issue of grammar, or they come from the kinds of sentences written by journalism students (and sometimes by practicing journalists). A Request You can make a contribution to this site by giving extra credit to students who identify errors. For this to help, we need specific information on the exercise, the text of the question, the incorrect answer, what the correct answer should be, and how this answer was determined to be correct. In the Review exercises, questions appear in random order, so a problem cannot be identified by the number of the question. Basic Method Assign the Newsroom exercise sets in groups of five. Every five sets, have students take a review exercise. The best students will use that grade to calibrate the amount of effort they need to apply in order to master this material. When they receive less than 100% on a review, they will note their areas of weakness, practice them, consult other reference sources, and master the material. Some students, however, may require you to test them before they apply themselves with discipline. Here are some suggestions for ways to test students in order to motivate and assess them: Using an in-class computer lab: When a student completes an exercise, the scores appear on a Thanks pop-up on screen. You can record those scores as the grade. You may want to take some care that students do not (1) open the practice exercises and extract the correct answers from them, or (2) repeatedly take the review exercise in hopes of raising the grade. On paper: You can devise your own selection of questions from the quizzes by making a paper quiz and giving it in class. Multiple-choice is the simplest. Varying the questions makes it more realistic. Best of all are editing passages that require students to recognize and apply the items just practiced. If you create such passages, consider contributing them to this site for others to use. I do not have a method, however, for grading such passages automatically. You have to grade them by hand. The Stylebook, by Chapter The AP Stylebook exercises provide a chapter-by-chapter introduction to the stylebook, focusing mainly on the most basic and most common items in each chapter. You can use these as a rapid way to expose students to the rudiments of AP style and to prepare them for the more realistic examples found in the Newsroom exercises, which are not arranged by topic or chapter. You will want to review the content of the AP exercises, so you will understand their limitations. No set of exercises can teach the stylebook. For that, you need the stylebook. Some students may not be adept at learning from a reference book such as the AP Stylebook. Those in particular may find these exercises a helpful way to start. Diagnostic Test I hope to post a test to help users identify specific grammatical weaknesses. Meanwhile, teachers probably know many of these already, on the basis of earlier student work. When you identify students with weaknesses in any of the following areas, assign them to practice the "Specific Topics": Hyphens Nouns Possessives Pronouns Spelling Subject-Verb and Verb problems Word Usage Dropped Word Endings Lay and Lie The "Grammar Review" section includes exercises on these additional areas: Adjectives Lay and Lie (again) Punctuation Essential and Non-Essential Misplaced Modifiers Redundancy And an assortment of grammatical items. Page through the sets bulleted above and you will quickly see which areas of grammar each one provides practice for. When you identify students who need practice in these areas, assign them to this part of the site. Unless you have highly motivated students, you'll want to assess them on these areas later in class or in their written work. Student grammar handbooks. You might assign students to make their own grammar handbooks that identify the specific aspects of grammar each student has difficulty with. For each problem area, have the student identify the problem, state the grammatical rule and give three original examples of correct usage. Require students to proofread each assignment against their grammar handbooks before turning them in. The sections of this site contain some repetition, and they may not be arranged in an ideal order. That is because they grew slowly, over time, in response to student needs. But here they are, a crooked road to straighter grammar. -- May they do you good.

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