“Participial Phrase: A present or past participle with accompanying modifiers, objects, or complements. The buzzards, circling with sinister determination, squawked loudly.”
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
Last but not least on this rainy Thursday afternoon, here is a context clues worksheet on the adjective colloquial. This is one of those words (like most of the context clues worksheets I’ve published here lately, this popped up as the Word of the Day at Merriam-Webster a few days back) that tempts me, because it shows up in educated discourse all over the place, to develop a series of worksheets for its family, to wit, colloquialism, colloquy, colloquium and colloquist–all of which have a solid Latin lineage.
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.
“The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where one question grew before.”
“Evolution of the Scientific Point of View” (1908)
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Years ago, when I worked in a school that had a cooperative career and technical education (CTE) program, I served students either in such a program or on their way to one. I developed this reading on x-rays and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet for students interested in becoming x-ray technicians.
Then I never used it. For one thing, it is highly technical with a lot of relatively advanced scientific vocabulary. As the years went by the CTE program slipped away, and any modifications I might have performed to make this material more readable while making it more comprehensive went with the program.
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.
“How were critics Mark and Carl Van Doren related? They were brothers. Both were members of the faculty of Columbia University. Carl from 1911 to 1930 and Mark from 1920 to 1959.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
This isn’t a political blog, but if you followed the news on the national convention (or the convention itself) of one of the major political parties in the United States last month, you’ll understand why I think it’s time to post this Cultural Literacy worksheet on nepotism.
Incidentally, I doubt that there are many teachers in this country who haven’t attended a professional development day in which the importance of critical thinking was discussed. As Daniel Willingham asked in an article for the American Federation of Teachers’ magazine American Educator, “Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach?” The answer is complicated, but a summary would go something like this: critical thinking is a complicated cognitive act involving, among other things, using a rich fund of prior knowledge and conceptual vocabulary to think synthetically in order to understand new and unexpected circumstances and things.
Nepotism, I’ll argue here, is one of those conceptually rich terms that gives students the cognitive tools to evaluate and navigate a variety of situations in educational institutions, workplaces, governments, and bureaucracies. It can also equip them to understand why–and yes, develop a critical understanding of why–institutions, businesses and governments develop inertia and dysfunction. In a time when our periodicals and television news channels carry daily news about toxic workplaces characterized by cliquish incompetence, nepotism is a word students should know so they can understand its conceptual meaning and use it as a tool for assessment of the dismal workplaces in which so many of us spend our lives.
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.
“Article. A good and useful word, but used without meaning by shopkeepers; as, ‘A good article of vinegar,’ for a good vinegar.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged diction/grammar/style/usage, humor, literary oddities
It’s Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day today, so here is a context clues worksheet on the verb encumber. It’s used only transitively, do don’t forget your direct objects after its use.
Incidentally, in addition to meaning, as it does in the worksheet above, “weight down, burden” and “to impede or hamper the function or activity of,” encumber can also mean “to burden with a legal claim (as a mortgage).” Thus, the noun encumbrance will show up in mortgage contracts. These are all good concepts and words for informed consumers (i.e. our students) to know.
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.
“Local Color: System of representing the color of an object which begins with its hue and adds shade or lightness by the addition of black or white pigment to give a more naturalistic appearance. Pure or shaded local color was used almost exclusively until the late 19th century, when the Impressionists discovered that the brain blends contrasting hues into vibrant impressions of actual color.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
It was one of the Words of the Day I marked down when I was out for a short vacation last week, and it’s a good word used regularly in conversational English, so here is context clues worksheet on the noun heyday if you can use it.
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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