5 exercises — practise "what...is" pseudo-cleft sentences for emphasis in technical writing.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
Which sentence correctly forms a wh-cleft to emphasize what the team needs to prioritize this sprint?
"What the team needs to prioritize this sprint is the checkout flow refactor" is correct: a wh-cleft begins with a "what"-clause in normal (non-inverted) word order, followed by a form of "be" agreeing with the focused element, then the emphasized information. Option B incorrectly uses the base form "be" instead of the correctly conjugated "is". Option C incorrectly uses "that" instead of "what" to introduce the cleft clause; "that" does not form this pseudo-cleft pattern. Option D incorrectly inserts question-style inversion ("does the team need") inside the what-clause, which must remain in statement word order.
2 / 5
Which sentence correctly forms a reversed wh-cleft, placing the focused information first?
"A faster CI pipeline is what the team wants most" is the correctly reversed wh-cleft: the focused noun phrase comes first, followed by "is", followed by the "what"-clause in normal word order. Option A scrambles the order, placing "is" incorrectly at the very end. Option C incorrectly begins with "is", turning the statement into an ungrammatical question-like fragment. Option D incorrectly adds inversion ("does the team want") inside the what-clause, which should remain uninverted.
3 / 5
Which sentence correctly forms a wh-cleft to emphasize the cause identified during a postmortem?
"What caused the outage was a misconfigured load balancer" is correct: the singular focus "a misconfigured load balancer" requires the singular "was", and the what-clause uses normal statement word order without an extra auxiliary. Option A incorrectly uses the plural "were" for a singular focus. Option B incorrectly inserts "that" before the focused noun phrase, which is not used in this pattern. Option D incorrectly adds the emphatic auxiliary "did" inside the what-clause, which is unnecessary and non-standard here.
4 / 5
Which sentence correctly forms a wh-cleft with an -ing action as the focus, describing what fixed a memory leak?
"What fixed the memory leak was upgrading the garbage collector" is correct: the focused element after "was" can be a gerund phrase describing the action taken. Option A incorrectly combines "to" with the gerund "upgrading", which is a mismatched, ungrammatical hybrid. Option B incorrectly uses the bare base form "upgrade" instead of the gerund, which does not fit grammatically after "was". Option C unnecessarily inserts the emphatic auxiliary "did" inside the what-clause.
5 / 5
Which sentence correctly forms a wh-cleft to emphasize what a new engineer should do first, using "all" as an alternative wh-cleft opener?
"All you need to do is read the onboarding docs" is a correctly formed "all"-cleft (a close relative of the wh-cleft): after "is", the focused verb phrase appears as a bare infinitive (without "to"), which is standard when the cleft clause ends in "do". Option A incorrectly inserts "to" before the gerund "reading", creating an ungrammatical mix. Option B omits the required "is" entirely, leaving the sentence without a main verb linking the two halves. Option C redundantly adds "that" and an extra object pronoun "it", which breaks the clean "all"-cleft pattern.