Friday, March 20, 2020

Top 7 Apps For a Polished Writing

Top 7 Apps For a Polished Writing You have your rough draft finished. Now the tough part. You know you are not that skilled in grammar and usage, and your essays and papers tend to get lower grades because of this failing. Consider yourself lucky to be living in this technological age. Students before you had to live with their writing deficits or find some trusted friend to do their editing for them. You dont. There are now great apps and tools that will make all of those corrections for you, and heres 7 that you can begin to use today. You will never again have to submit a piece of writing that is not completely polished and ready for a good grade. ProWritingAid: This is a great app, if you want flexibility in pricing for what your specific needs are. There is one version that is totallly free and that will provide 19 reports related to verb tense, subject-verb agreement, awkward phrasing, sentence structure errors, mechanics, and so forth. You do have a word limit 3000 in fact which translates to about a 12-page essay or paper. And there is no interactive editing. Your errors will be pointed out and you will be responsible for fixing them. But, if you can cough up $35 a year, you will have an unlimited number of pages and you will get interactive editing you will receive suggestions for repairing your errors, and you can choose to accept them or not. For an additional $5/year, you will get the whole enchilada which would be particularly useful for grad students working on theses and dissertations. Grammarly This app is so user friendly. Once you are registered with username and password, all you do is log in and upload your document. Grammarly takes care of all the rest. As you can see from the screen shot above, it will underline errors and place the corrections in the right margin. You can edit you work right there. Grammarly has a plagiarism check that can be activated with just one click too. The free version does not allow for all of the features, of course, but for $49, you have a permanent piece of software with unlimited usage. This app is great for students from high school forward, and is especially great for college students who are anticipating several years of academic study. Hemingway This app is titled Hemingway, after the author who was famous for simple sentences and brevity of language to get his point across. There are 5 categories of editing, each one color coded. When there is a grammar error, you will see the problem lit up in blue. If you have sentences that are to complex and cumbersome, they will be highlighted in red. And once all that highlighting is finished, there will be suggestions. Hemingway also gives you a readability level which is particularly important for college students. There is a free web app which will give you basic editing in the cloud, but you cannot save your pieces. For $6.99, however, you can download the app either on Mac or Windows devices. AftertheDeadline This is a tool that works much like Grammarly or Hemingway, but really focuses in on grammar, spelling, and punctuation. While it will point out run-on sentences and fragments, it will not point out awkwardness of phrasing and such unless you upgrade. It too has color-coded messages that underline errors and provides the grammar rule that applies. It is then up to you to make the corrections based upon the grammar rule. This app is free, but if you want the fixes given as well, you will need to upgrade to the paid version. Students should know that this app does not differentiate among American, British and Canadian English, and this might be a bit of a drawback. But, if you have a separate spellcheck feature on your word processing program, spelling should not be an issue. SlickWrite This is an app for copywriters, students, business writers anyone who must have polished writing for the view of others. It operates much like other editing tools. Check out the demo before you decide if you want to purchase this app there are options pricing levels based upon how much editing/polishing you want. BibMe Bibliographies are no longer a problem with this app. All you do is type in the bibliographical information, choose your citation style, and this free app generates a citation which you can then just copy and paste into your bibliography page. If you want to save your citations, you will have to upgrade to the paid version. ProCustomWriting

Wednesday, March 4, 2020

Reading Comprehension Worksheet 2

Reading Comprehension Worksheet 2 Reading comprehension is like anything; to get good at it, you need to practice. Luckily, you can do that, here, with this Reading Comprehension Worksheet 2 – The End of Overeating. Directions: The passage below is followed by questions based on its content; answer the questions on the basis of what is stated or implied in the passage. Printable PDFs: The End of Overeating Reading Comprehension Worksheet | The End of Overeating Reading Comprehension Worksheet Answer Key From The End of Overeating by David Kessler. Copyright  © 2009 by David Kessler. Years of research had educated me about how sugar, fat, and salt change the brain. I understood some of the parallels between hyperpalatable foods and drugs of abuse, and about the links among sensory stimulation, cues, and memory. Id met enough people like Claudia and Maria to understand how even the thought of food could cause them to lose control. But I wasnt fully prepared for the discoveries I made about irresistibility and whoosh, the Monster Thickburger and Baked! Cheetos Flamin Hot, about indulgence and purple cows. Without necessarily understanding the underlying science, the food industry has discovered what sells. I was sitting at Chilis Grill Bar in Chicagos OHare Airport waiting for a late-night flight. At a nearby table a couple in their early forties was deep into a meal. The woman was overweight, with about 180 pounds on her five-foot-four-inch frame. The Southwestern Eggrolls she had ordered were listed as a starter course, but the enormous platter in front of her had been heaped with food. The dish was described on the menu as smoked chicken, black beans, corn, jalapeà ±o Jack cheese, red peppers, and spinach wrapped inside a crispy flour tortilla, and it was served with a creamy avocado-ranch dipping sauce. Despite its name, the dish looked more like a burrito than an egg roll, an only-in-America fusion approach. I watched as the woman attacked her food with vigor and speed. She held the egg roll in one hand, dunked it into the sauce, and brought it to her mouth while using the fork in her other hand to scoop up more sauce. Occasionally she reached over and speared some of her companions french fries. The woman ate steadily, working her way around the plate with scant pause for conversation or rest. When she finally paused, only a little lettuce was left. Had she known someone was watching her, Im sure she would have eaten differently. Had she been asked to describe what she had just eaten, she probably would have substantially underestimated her consumption. And she would probably have been surprised to learn what the ingredients in her meal really were. The woman might have been interested in how my industry source, who had called sugar, fat, and salt the three points of the compass, described her entree. Deep-frying the tortilla drives down its water content from 40 percent to about 5 percent and replaces the rest with fat. The tortilla is really going to absorb a lot of fat, he said. It looks like an egg roll is supposed to look, which is crispy and brown on the outside. The food consultant read through other ingredients on the label, keeping up a running commentary as he did. Cooked white meat chicken, binder added, smoke flavor. People like smoky flavor - its the caveman in them. Theres green stuff in there, he said, noting the spinach. That makes me feel like Im eating something healthy. Shredded Monterey Jack cheese.... The increase in per-capita consumption of cheese is off the chart. The hot peppers, he said, add a little spice, but not too much to kill everything else off. He believed the chicken had been chopped and formed much like a meat loaf, with binders added, which makes those calories easy to swallow. Ingredients that hold moisture, including autolyzed yeast extract, sodium phosphate, and soy protein concentrate, further soften the food. I noticed that salt appeared eight times on the label and that sweeteners were there five times, in the form of corn-syrup solids, molasses, honey, brown sugar, and sugar. This is highly processed? I asked. Absolutely, yes. All of this has been processed such that you can wolf it down fast...chopped up and made ultrapalatable.... Very appealing looking, very high pleasure in the food, very high caloric density. Rules out all that stuff you have to chew. By eliminating the need to chew, modern food processing techniques allow us to eat faster. When youre eating these things, youve had 500, 600, 800, 900 calories before you know it, said the consultant. Literally before you know it. Refined food simply melts in the mouth. Reading Comprehension Worksheet Questions 1. It can be inferred from the authors description of the woman eating in paragraph four that(A) The woman prefers to eat at Chilis vs. other restaurants.(B) The woman truly enjoys the foods that she chooses to eat.(C) The womans efficiency at cleaning her plate adds to her dining experience.(D) The author is disgusted by the womans consumption.(E) The author believes the woman should take a course in healthy eating. 2. According to the passage, the main reason people overeat is(A) because salt and sweeteners, like corn-syrup solids and brown sugar, are added to the food.(B) because we dont have to chew our food very much.(C) because people like smoky flavor.(D) because sugar, fat and salt change the brain.(E) because we are used to eating quickly in this modern society. 3. The following are all ingredients in the egg rolls, EXCEPT(A) salt(B) binders(C) honey(D) spinach(E) dark meat chicken 4. Which of the following statements best describes the main idea of the passage? (A) If you eat too much food too quickly, youll gain weight and become unhealthy.(B) Because refined food is irresistible and easy to eat, it masks how unhealthy it is, leaving people unaware of the poor food choices theyre making.(C) Chilis is one of the restaurants in the U.S. serving unhealthy food to consumers today.(D) Food consultants and authors are making Americans aware of their unhealthy eating habits, thus, creating healthier generations for years to come.(E) Refined foods, with salt, sugar, and fat hidden inside, are less nutritious and more damaging than whole foods. 5. In the first sentence of paragraph four, the word vigor most nearly means(A) pleasure(B) flamboyance(C) lethargy(D) energy(E) craftiness Answer and Explanation More Reading Comprehension Practice