“…a pervasive silliness that turns finally—if one must bring up the university image—into college humor, a kind of MAD magazine joke.”
Christian Science Monitor
Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
If you listen to the general day-to-day discourse in our society, particularly political discourse, you have probably noticed that while it is often forthrightly counterfactual and mendacious, it is also coarse and myopic. For that reason, I offer this context clues worksheet on the noun nuance. Everybody should know this abstract noun and the concept it represents–you know, subtlety, shades of meaning, thoughtfulness, and the gradations of the analysis that follow these approaches to understanding something deeply.
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.
“Back of for Behind, At the Back of. ‘Back of law is force.’”
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
If you can use it (I didn’t fully understand the concept until I was well into my undergraduate education), here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on nihilism as a concept in philosophy, which is this word’s function at bottom–to dress up an abstract concept like a belief in nothing. You might want to help your students make the connection with the Latin word root nihil, which means, simply, nothing.
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.
“Subordinate Clause: A clause dependent on the main clause in a sentence. After we finish our work, we will go out to dinner.”
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
Here is a worksheet on the Latin word roots cede, ceed, and cess. They mean to go and to yield. However, the words that stem from these roots, which are extremely productive in English, like proceed, precede, and succeed point up the necessity of an adverbial question, e.g. to go when and where? To yield when and where?
Those kinds of questions will help students arrive on their own at the fundamental meaning of these roots.
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.
“What was the first book printed in English? The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, a prose romance by Raoul Lefevre, printed by William Caxton in 1474 in Bruges, Belgium. Caxton himself translated it from the French. Caxton also printed the first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, published on November 18, 1477.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Readers and users of this blog are already aware that I have published here a great deal of reference material related to the visual and plastic arts. I’m well aware that I’m not the only person to decry the decline of arts education in our public schools. I’m not an artist myself–I cannot draw a straight line without the aid of solid straight edge to guide my writing instrument–but I love art and believe kids should learn about it–if not learn to create art themselves.
In that spirit, here is a reading on expressionism and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.
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.
The simplest concept is Ren, which is literally your name: it lives for as long as you are remembered, or can be read about on inscriptions, or included in prayers for the ancestors and their achievements. Ka is also easy enough to translate into modern idiom, for it is that vital essence that makes the difference between the living and the dead, between life and dead meat, between a warm body and cold clay.
Ib is literally the heart, formed from a single drop of clotted blood extracted from your mother’s heart at the hour of your conception or birth. By heart, the Egyptians meant not just the organ for pumping blood around your body, but the seat of your soul, the good directing force in your life, searching after truth, peace, and harmony.
Ba is that which makes each of us unique and different, that which makes us strive and achieve, the motivator but also the hungry elemental force that needs food and sex. In some form, your ba is destined to survive after death, often depicted or imagined as a human-headed bird, which with good fortune will go forth by day to enjoy the light, but might also end up existing only in the dark, like the bat or the ruin-haunting owl. Sheut is your shadow, and by extension the other you, as well as being used to describe a statue, a model, or a painting of a human.”
Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.
While I recall that I felt an urgent need for it when I wrote it, I can’t now remember why I needed this context clues worksheet on the noun numerology. Generally, when I feel urgency to write something, it means a student expressed interest in a subject. I imagine that was the case when this document arrived in my files. Anyway, numerology is basically a form of mysticism, and you will find numerous examples of numerology (as above) drawn from Barnaby Rogerson’s Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.
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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