Hacker Exercises Experience

This was my experience with the Hacker Exercises:

             At the beginning, it felt somewhat tedious. I wasn't open to the idea of doing many exercises to improve my English skills. I thought my skills were adequate. To an extent, I wasn't wrong. Although, I still needed to be reminded of some rules and suggestions. Some things are forgotten due to bad habits and others we are simply ignorant to. During some exercises I was confused sometimes, but after working through a few examples it gradually began to make sense. Especially during "needed words" I was able to see and learn from my mistakes. For example: Christopher had an attention span longer than that of the other students. "That of" clarifies what is being described in the sentence. Without it, the reader would easily make the assumption that Christopher's attention span must be longer than the other students themselves are, instead of his attention span being longer than their attention spans. Parallelism was one topic that intrigued me. The way that makes it crystal clear for the reader is always the best choice. For example: In 1998, a tsunami hit a populated coast in Papua New Guinea, killing two thousand people and wiping out whole towns. Or: In 1998, a tsunami hit a populated coast in Papua New Guinea, killing two thousand people and whole towns were wiped out. The second sentence explains the same thing, but the way it says "whole towns were wiped out" isn't parallel with the verb used before it, "killing," and should be stated as it was in the first sentence. Misplaced modifiers taught me that the limiting modifier "only" should come just before the words it modifies to avoid confusion. All in all i have learned how to make my sentences and, further, my thoughts more clear and precise.