[Edprof] Additions to Newsroom101.Com

[Gerald Grow]

I've added some new material to Newsroom101.Com, and it is available 
for you and your students to use.

If you click on the Grammar Review link, you'll find most of the new 
material, including:

- practice identifying parts of speech (colleagues convinced me this 
was important)

- practice on identifying phrases, clauses, fragments and sentence types

- a 12-part introduction to nouns and their problems, along with two 
sets of practice exercises

- the start of an introduction to pronouns and their problems. Some 
of it links students to Purdue and Commnet exercises, but it also 
includes my new explanations of pronoun agreement and especially "the 
who/whom trick" (with 45 practice items).

- 86 items practicing subject-verb agreement by requiring students to 
extract the "core sentence" from a regular or a problem sentence 
(mainly by picking out the subject and verb). These exercises mark an 
attempt to find a new way to learn subject-verb agreement.

- a 7-part review of commas, with practice exercises after (nearly) 
every part, including:
	* Commas between Elements in a Series
	* Commas After Introductory Clauses and Phrases
	* Commas before Conjunctions
	* Abusing Commas
	* Commas between Equal Adjectives
	* Commas with Quotes
	* Commas in other situations

- A new unit with more than 100 juicy spelling words (the words are 
thanks to my colleague LaRae Donnellan), using a new format. Students 
get to see the words on one page; in the practice quiz, they get a 
phonetic spelling of a word and are asked to type in the real word 
after mentally "hearing" it.

Putting the new material into place has required a good deal of 
churning of the site, so if you find something that is not working 
properly, please let me know and I'll fix it. I wanted to post this 
material before the fall semester starts.

I developed the new items for a language skills course this summer, 
and they have received a first vetting from students looking for 
extra credit by finding my errors -- though no doubt students missed 
some.

All the best,

Gerald Grow


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