“Illusionism: The use of optical principles to create the illusion that a painted object is real. Among the techniques are PERSPECTIVE, FORESHORTENING, and CHIAROSCURO. QUADRATURA and TROMPE L’OEIL are other forms of illusionism.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
This context clues worksheet on the strong abstract noun subterfuge. It’s Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day today, but as I want to reiterate, this is a very strong abstract noun and commonly used in educated discourse. It also stems from the Latin word root sub, which is incredibly productive in English.
If you search sub–just sub–on this site (the search bar is in the upper-right-hand corner), you will find all kinds of material to complement this worksheet.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Infinitive/Split Infinitive: In the present tense, a verb phrase consisting of to followed by the base form of the verb (to write). A split infinitive occurs when one or more words separate to and the verb (to boldly go).”
Excerpted from: Strunk, William Jr., and E.B. White. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition. New York: Longman, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
When I taught in Springfield, Massachusetts, (which hosts a minor league hockey team), a number of students in my literacy intervention class wanted to read about hockey. So I worked up this reading on the Miracle on Ice and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet for their consumption. If you’re not old enough to remember it, or are not a hockey or Olympics fan, the Miracle on Ice is the United States Olympic Hockey Team’s upset victory over the Russian team at the 1980 Olympics at Lake Placid, New York.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“As sheer casual reading matter, I still find the English dictionary the most interesting book in the English language.”
Memoirs of a Superfluous Man ch. 1 (1943)
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Alright, here is a worksheet on the Greek word root pro, which means before, forward, forth, in place of, and in addition to. This root is so productive in English–as this worksheet shows in summary–that I hardly need mention it. Interestingly, in Russia, this root shows up as a preposition meaning “about.”
Editorially speaking, let me just say this: adding pro to other words, such as active, a perfectly serviceable adjective per se, improves neither the root nor the word to which it added. It does, as Paul Fussell once commented, contribute to the average American’s mistaken perception of themselves as smarter for having added a syllable to a word. Proactive does not mean, alas, anymore than active does.
Let’s leave pro to words like prokaryote.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Paradigm: [From Greek paradeigma, a pattern, an example, a basis for comparison. Stress: ‘PA-ra-dime’]. In grammar, a set of all the (especially inflected) forms of a word (write, writes, wrote, writing, written), especially when used as a model for word forms in Latin and Greek (in which key words represent the patterns of numbered groups in nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc.) and to a lesser extent for such other languages as French and Spanish (principally for verbs). Their use is limited in English, because it is not a highly inflected language.”
Excerpted from: McArthur, Tom. The Oxford Concise Companion to the English Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Here’s a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Jerusalem, the center of the world’s monotheistic religions and a field of conflict for centuries. This is a full-page worksheet, so it might work well for independent practice–i.e. homework.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Appreciate for Highly Value. In the sense of value, it means value justly, not highly. In another and preferable sense it means to increase in value.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Here is an English usage worksheet on differentiating than and then in prose and speech. This relatively minor area of usage is nonetheless sufficiently thorny to have warranted a surprisingly lengthy exchange on it between two characters on The Wire. As the state’s attorney explains to the detectives seeking a court order for a wiretap (as does this worksheet), than is a conjunction and then is an adverb.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
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