Ready-to-Use Revision and Proofreading Activities: Unit 5 »

Jack Umstatter, a master English teacher with over 25 years experience, is a multiple winner of the Teacher of the Year award. He currently teaches English in the Cold Spring Harbor School District in New York and education and literature at Dowing College in Oakdale, New York. He is the author of Brain Games!, Hooked on English! and other practical teacher resources published by The Center.

This resource is one of six units in the Writing Skills Curriculum Library, a practical series that provides over 540 stimulating, ready-to-use activity sheets to help you teach and reinforce writing skills in middle/junior high and senior school students, grades 6-12.

Each unit in the series focuses on a different area of writing skills and is complete and self-contained, including 90 reproducible activities in a variety of formats, a brief teacher's guide to effective use of the activities, and full answer keys. The activities can be used in any order in any developmental or corrective writing program to meet the specific needs of individual students, small groups, or an entire class.

For quick selection, each unit includes a detailed table of contents listing the major skills/topics covered in that unit followed by the activities for teaching and reinforcing each skill. Here's just an overview of what you'll find in each unit:

Unit 1 READY-TO-USE WORDS ACTIVITIES provides 90 activity sheets to help students learn the importance of word selection and precision in the writing process. Topics covered include connotation and denotation, roots, prefixes and suffixes, synonyms and antonyms, and expressions that heighten students' awareness of making correct word choices.

Unit 2 READY-TO-USE SENTENCE ACTIVITIES presents 90 activities that involve students in the essentials of sentence construction, subjects and predicates, complements, phrases, clauses, types of sentences, agreement, and mechanics as well as problems of wordiness, transition, ambiguity, and more.

Unit 3 READY-TO-USE PARAGRAPH WRITING ACTIVITIES features 90 stimulating activities that lead students through the steps of writing clear, convincing paragraphs. Topics range from brainstorming techniques and topic sentences to using supporting ideas and introducing, organizing, and concluding the paragraph.

Unit 4 READY-TO-USE PREWRITING & ORGANIZATION ACTIVITIES offers 90 reproducible activities that explore ways of gathering and using information intelligently. Activities cover a wide range of topics such as information sources, categorizing, topic and subtopic summaries, outlines, and term paper ideas and formats.

Unit 5 READY-TO-USE REVISION & PROOFREADING ACTIVITIES present 90 high-interest activities to guide students through the problem areas of writing including verb tense, words often confused, superfluity, issues of clarity, and proofreading techniques used by professional writers.

Unit 6 READY-TO-USE PORTFOLIO DEVELOPMENT ACTIVITIES includes 90 activities that expose students to different types of writing such as literary analysis, stories and sketches, narratives, reviews, letters, journal entries, newspaper article, character analysis, dialogue writing essays, and commercials.

Together, the six units in the Writing Skills Curriculum Library give you an unparalleled store of tested, ready-to-use exercises for building skills in all aspects of writing. They will help your students learn the elements of effective writing and enjoy the experience at the same time.

About the Writing Skills Curriculum Library.
About Unit 5.
Teacher's Correction Marks.
SECTION ONE: WORKING OUT WITH WORDS AND EXPRESSIONS.
5- 1. The Plural Puzzle.
5 -2. Working with Plurals.
5 -3. The Abbreviations Puzzle.
5 -4. Working with Possessives.
5- 5. Mrs. Livingston's List.
5 -6. Working Your Way To 64 with Every 2 Out of 5.
5- 7. When Is a Building Raised? When Is a Building Razed?
5 -8. Three in a Row.
5 -9. Words We Often Confuse.
5 -10. Knowing the Difference.
5 -11. Is it the Right Word?
5 -12. Avoiding Idioms.
5 -13. Casting Away the Cliche.
5 -14. Don't be as Stubborn as a Mule.
5 -15. What Exactly Is All This?.
5 -16. Making Your Writing Clearer.
5 -17. Mrs. Linker's Class.
5 -18. Mrs. Malaprop Has to Go!
SECTION TWO: MAKING SENSE WITH SENTENCES.
5 -19. Seven-up.
5 -20. Sentence or Fragment?
5 -21. Oldies but Goodies.
5 -22. Completing the Incomplete.
5 -23. Five Across.
5 -24. A Computer Glitch (Or Two or Three or . . .).
5 -25. Out of Order.
5 -26. Stringing the Words Together.
5 -27. Ten or Fewer.
5 -28. Constructing Sentences by the Numbers.
5 -29. Let's Expand Here.
5 -30. Thematic Sentences.
5 -31. Helping Mr. Hopkins.
5 -32. Matching the Sentence's Two Parts.
5 -33. Quotations.
5 -34. Crazy Quotations.
5 -35. The Big Concert.
SECTION THREE: GRABBING HOLD OF THE GRAMMAR AND USAGE PROBLEMS.
5 -36. Indefinite Pronouns and Water.
5 -37. Be the Teacher.
5 -38. Finding a Match.
5 -39. Parts-of-Speech Fill-Ins.
5 -40. Clauses.
5 -41. Do You Agree?
5 -42. Detecting the Wrong Verbs.
5 -43. Has He Ate the WholePie?
5 -44. Using the Correct Verb Tense.
5 -45. Irregular Verbs.
5 -46. Doing the Eighty-One.
5 -47. Driving to Work Last Friday, Dad Was in Bloom.
5- 48. Lucky Thirteen Grammar Matching.
5 -49. Diagnostic Test of Usage.
5 -50. One to a Sentence.
5 -51. Problems . . . Problems . . . Problems.
5 -52. Do You Know Your Grammar and Usage?
5 -53. Assessing Some Skills.
5 -54. Nationalities Are in-True or False?
5 -55. Ten . . . Twenty-Six . . . Sixty-Five.
SECTION FOUR: THE EDITOR'S DESK.
5 -56. The Infamous Twenty-Five.
5 -57. Spelling Solutions.
5 -58. Completing the Spelling.
5 -59. Spelling Success.
5 -60. Capital Letters.
5 -61. Mastering Apostrophes.
5 -62. Doubling the Number of Apostrophe Errors.
5 -63. The Missing 30.
5 -64. The Punctuation Puzzle.
5 -65. Why We Use the Comma.
5 -66. The Reasons for the Comma.
5 -67. Detecting the Common Writing Errors.
5 -68. Finding the Eleven Problems.
5-69. Writing Errors.
5 -70. Don't Get Any of These Wrong!.
5 -71. A Glimpse at the College Scene.
5 -72. It Is Now Time to Eliminate the Wordiness of These Groups of Words.
5 -73. Now That Is a Mouthful!.
5 -74. Unloading Some Words.
5 -75. Too Wordy!
SECTION FIVE: MOVING ON TO LONGER WRITINGS.
5 -76. Growing Pains.
5 -77. An Editor's Nightmare.
5 -78. Too Many I's.
5 -79. Here's to the Editors!.
5 -80. Ouch!
5- 81. Assessing a Paragraph.
5 -82. What's in a Paragraph?.
5 -83. The CD Dilemma.
5- 84. A Letter in Need of Repair.
5 -85. Becoming More Sophisticated.
5 -86. Transitions.
5- 87. Joining Them.
5 -88. Punctuating the Dialogue.
5 -89. Supporting the Thesis Statement.
5 -90. The Final Word: Use a Better Word.
Answer Key.