Hacker Exercises

 8-1 Active vs. passive verbs : Although I knew the difference between active and passive voice, it was a good reminder.

 8-2 Active vs. be verbs: This exercise made me think of what is considered "strong" and "weak" writing, and getting to the point of a sentence.

 8-3 Active verbs  (edit and compare): This exercise made me think about who is doing the action in a sentence.

 9-1 Parallelism: This exercise didn't help me much because it was an easy concept for me that I already understood.

 9-2 Parallelism: This exercise on parallelism made me learn about one new concept, but other than that it wasn't extremely helpful. 

 9-3 Parallelism  (edit and compare): All of my revisions were like the examples, confirming my ability for parallelism.

 10-1 Needed words: My group is specializing on this topic, so I knew a lot about this topic already. 

 10-2 Needed words  (edit and compare): This exercise wasn't too hard because I recognized most of the errors right away.

 11-1 Mixed constructions: This was fairly straightforward, except for two questions. I did learn about the order and phrasing of sentences from this.

 11-2 Mixed constructions  (edit and compare): This exercised tricked me, because when it didn't need revising I would create something wrong with the sentence even though it was correct. 

 12-1 Misplaced modifiers: This was by far the most difficult topic for me. This exercise was very useful in explaining WHY and HOW modifiers are placed.

 12-2 Misplaced modifiers  (edit and compare): The explanations for the editing really helped to further understanding modifiers. I've discovered a weakness of mine in revising, and I plan to work on it. 

 12-3 Dangling modifiers: Although I struggled with placing modifiers, this exercise was much easier. I suppose that the previous practice has made modifiers easier to understand for me.

 12-4 Dangling modifiers  (edit and compare): This exercise was a good reinforcement of the concept of modifiers and where to place them.

 13-1 Shifts: person and number: This exercise wasn't very helpful because it was fairly simple and easy.

 13-2 Shifts: tense: This exercise wasn't very helpful, because it was too easy for me.

 13-3 Shifts: This exercise was a good combination of the two previous topics, but I already understand the concept of shifts.

 13-4 Shifts  (edit and compare): This exercise was moderately helpful, because the examples were slightly more challenging than previous ones. 

 14-1 Choppy sentences: I caught the mistakes right away and I rarely write choppy sentences, so this topic wasn't very helpful. 

 14-2 Choppy sentences  (edit and compare): My revisions weren't exactly like the ones they had showed, but I believe they were grammatically correct. This exercise did help me understand WHY some sentences are choppy.

 14-3 Subordination: This was possibly the easiest exercise for me. Although I got them all correct, I didn't learn much.


Source of the exercises: http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/bedhandbook7enew