Teachers may use cloze activities in NewsMaker to improve student writing skills as well as their reading comprehension skills. For example, teachers can create a cloze passage to get their students to practice subject-verb agreement, punctuation or to expand vocabulary, and they may even use the cloze passage to improve reading comprehension.


To create cloze activities in NewsMaker:

1.	Open the Notepad application that can be found under Accessories in the Windows Start Menu.
2.	Type the passage in the Notepad application or copy and paste a passage taken from another source (for example, from a webpage). Save the document as a normal text file. See Figure 1.
	Figure 1
3.	Use the following conventions to create blanks in the text, to provide the right answers or to provide multiple choices for the blanks:
	a. To create a blank in the text, replace the word to be deleted from the text with a pair of square parenthesis: “[]” with NO space between them. For example, “In [] template, I have created this simple template for you to see how easy…”. See Figure 2.
	Figure 2
	When students click on the blank and key their answer into the popped up box, regardless of whether their answer is a correct one or otherwise, their answers will be shown in Blue.
	b. To provide the correct answers for the blank, just type them within the square parenthesis. If there is more than one acceptable answer, then separate the answers with a comma. For example, “In [] template, I have [created, produced] this simple template for you to [see, take a look] how easy…”. When students click on the blank and key in their answer into the popped up box, if their answer is correct, they will be shown in Black, otherwise their answer will be shown in Red.
	c. To provide a list of multiple choices for the blank, just type them within the square parenthesis, and separate each choice by either “/”, “\” or “|”. Repeat the correct answer as the last entry within the square parenthesis. For example, “In []template, I have [created, produced] this simple template for you to [seeing/saw/see/seen/see] how easy…”. Note that the correct answer in this example is “see” and it is repeated at the end of the list within the square parenthesis. When students click on the blank and select their answer, again the correct one will be shown in Black, otherwise it will be shown in Red. If the correct answer is not repeated as the last entry within the square parenthesis, then regardless of what the students choose as their choice for the blank, their answer will be shown in Blue.
4.	To use this cloze text in NewsMaker, click on the Import Story button during writing stage of the software. See Figure 3. Select the text file to import when prompted The imported cloze passage will be displayed as shown in Figure 4.
	Figure 3
	Figure 4