Exercises — Week 15: Week 15 — Written Conventions: Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics

1. Conventions Edit: The Robotics Showcase Report

1. Copy this paragraph into a document: "Last Friday, Largo's robotics team competed at a regional showcase in Laurel, it was the team's first event of the season. Each of the six members have a role, the builder, the coder, the driver, two scouts and a captain. Ms. Ruiz who has coached the team for five years, said the robot ran perfectly. Until the final round. A sensor came loose, the robot drifted off course. Neither the captain nor the coders was able to fix it in time. Still, the judges praised the teams design, and they award Largo a trophy for creativity."
2. Find and fix every conventions error. There are ten: look for comma splices, a missing colon, missing commas around a nonessential clause and in a series, a fragment, agreement errors, a missing apostrophe, and a tense shift.
3. For each fix, write one short line naming the rule you used, for example "comma splice: added a semicolon."
4. Read your corrected paragraph aloud from the last sentence to the first, a proofreading trick that helps you notice each sentence on its own.
5. Score the original paragraph and your revision on the Written Conventions row (0–3): a 3 shows command of grammar, usage, capitalization, punctuation, and spelling with only minor errors; a 1 shows frequent errors that make meaning hard to follow. Write one sentence explaining each score.