Exercises and Quizzes

Specific details create word pictures that can make your writing easier to understand and more interesting to read. This exercise will give you practice in revising sentences to make them more concrete and specific.

A topic sentence contains the main idea upon which a paragraph is developed. What follows a topic sentence are a number of supporting sentences that develop the main idea with specific details.

This revision exercise will give you practice in writing with specific descriptive details.

This exercise will give you practice in expressing a main idea in a topic sentence that attracts the interest of your readers.

This exercise will give you practice in organizing a descriptive paragraph.

This exercise will give you practice in effectively organizing an informative paragraph--specifically, an objective report on the duties and skills required of a professional body snatcher.

In this exercise, we consider ways of revising a paragraph that was drafted in response to the guidelines in "How to Write a Place Description."

This exercise will give you practice in identifying direct objects in sentences.

This draft paragraph could be improved through careful focusing and the addition of more specific details. After carefully reading the description, respond to the revision questions and compare your answers to those on the next page.

In this exercise, you will practice identifying transitional words and phrases in short passages.

On these pages you'll find simple definitions of more than 400 commonly confused words. Follow the links for examples, practice exercises, and detailed discussions.

"Confusables" are words that are commonly mixed up because they look and sound alike. To test your familiarity with 50 of these often puzzling word pairs, set aside 15 minutes to take this big quiz. Select the word in each set that completes the sentence accurately and appropriately.

If you have studied our pages on "Choosing the Correct Word: Clearing Up Common Confusions," you should have no trouble completing this short review quiz.

In our Glossary of Usage you'll find more than 150 sets of commonly confused words. To test your familiarity with 20 of those word pairs, take a few minutes to do the following quiz.

Enjoy two lessons in one today: a quick quiz on commonly confused words packed in proverbial wisdom. Complete each proverb by selecting the correct word from each highlighted pair.

Practice in proofreading the work of others can help us become more aware of our own occasional slip-ups. This exercise offers practice in distinguishing some of those troublesome words that closely resemble other words--homonyms and homophones.

Here we'll apply the strategies that we have learned for cutting out needless words--deadwood that only bores, distracts, or confuses our readers.

Because what we take out of our writing can be just as important as what we put in, here we'll practice eliminating needless words--deadwood that bores, distracts, or confuses our readers.

To test your familiarity with the somewhat arbitrary rules for capitalization, edit the following sentences to correct any errors.

As pointed out in the article Plural Forms of English Nouns, we usually form the plural by adding "-s" or "-es" to the end of the noun. Except when we don't. Here's an opportunity to test your familiarity with some particularly tricky plurals: 15 questions, two minutes, correct answers on page two.

Practice your spelling skills by completing the following exercises.

This exercise will give you practice in locating and correcting spelling errors with the help of a dictionary.

This 20-item quiz is based on the latest edition of "the journalist's bible"--The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law. Give yourself five minutes to answer all the questions, and then compare your responses with the editors' rulings

This exercise will give you practice in recognizing gender-biased language and avoiding it in your writing.

As these 15 quirky questions indicate, About Grammar & Composition covers a wide range of topics related to the English language. Take a few minutes to test your knowledge of English and then begin exploring this website.

This quiz will test your understanding of some of the key events noted in our Timeline of the English Language.

Over the past 1,500 years, English has borrowed words from more than 300 other languages. To test your knowledge of where our words came from, take this matching quiz on loanwords.

Let's find out if you can tell the difference between a Cestrian and a Cytherean. Test your familiarity with demonyms by taking this quiz: match the place names with the names and nicknames for the people who live there.

"Toponym" refers to either a place name or a word coined in association with a place. Test your familiarity with toponyms by taking this matching quiz.

In this article, Neil Postman describes an engaging way of introducing students to the subject of etymology and the multicultural history of the English language.

Here's a chance to test your familiarity with 10 language-related terms ending in "-nym" (a suffix derived from the Greek word for "name" or "word").

These five English language examination papers were originally published in an appendix to "An Epitome of English Grammar," a textbook published in 1885.

Here are the answers to the three quizzes in Word Games for the Holidays.