ALPN - Local Resources

This document describes in broad terms the examples of bad usage of English and the large collection of exercises for helping students which has been collected on this site. All of the material is in the public domain and may be used freely as desired without specific acknowledgment to ALPN.

Examples

The examples of poor use of English which may be found using the buttons at the bottom of this document have generally been culled from the local press in Palmerston North.

In deference to the editors of the papers involved, we should point out that these have been collected over a period of years, with the dual aim of encouraging students to read local papers and, when reading, to do so critically. We have made them more or less anonymous by the removal of real names and substitution of xxx or yyy, etc in order to do so where necessary!

The buttons below linking to examples are links to groups of particular kinds of document. Each of the examples may contain many errors - either spelling, grammar, lexical and/or stylistic weaknesses!

Sentences - this button leads to an index document which links to separate documents each containing individual sentences having one or more errors - some glaring, some subtle. These are useful at an earlier stage of learning where a student is beginning to think about writing longer sentences.
Headings - these are taken from advertisements, picture captions, even article headings themselves, showing how easy it is to get a very simple phrase or sentence wrong. The examples are given in lists of a dozen.
Bad - this button links to an index of example articles which have appeared in various local papers and magazines. Each individual article contains many errors - both obvious ones and those which are more subtle.
Good - as the name indicates this button links to an index of articles which are better - though not all are perfect. Some of these examples have, so far as we can tell, no errors at all, but should still be read critically.

Exercises

The final button in the row below leads to a further introductory document describing the wide range of literacy and numeracy exercises which are either already present on this site or are in the couse of development and will be added as time is available for the necessary development work.

Make a note of the date when you last accessed this page. A change of date means that there have been additions or amendments to the examples and exercises - one of our continuing development tasks.

If you would like to contribute to this development task, drop an e-mail to us using the e-mail link below.