“The tediousness of continued allegory, and that too seldom striking or ingenious, has also contributed to render the Faerie Queen peculiarly tiresome…Spenser maintains his place upon the shelves, among our English classics; but he is seldom seen on the table.”
David Hume, in The History of Great Britain 1759
Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged humor, literary oddities, philosophy/religion, poetry, readings/research
Here is a worksheet on the Greek word roots trop/o and -tropy. This is a complicated pair: they mean turning, changing, figure of speech, and responding to a stimulus. A lot of the words in English that grow from this root are abstract and science related–one of them, of course, is trope, which literally means “a word or expression used in a figurative sense: FIGURE OF SPEECH,” and has happily turned up in the American vernacular. But you can also find in a word from physics, entropy.
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.
“Rhyme, also, rime: A general and literary term for the effect produced by using similar sounds: in the last stressed vowel (fire/lyre/desire/aspire) and in following vowels and consonants (inspiring/retiring; admiringly/conspiringly). Rhyme has been a major feature of English verse since the early medieval period, and is widely regarded as essential to it, although a great deal of verse is unrhymed.”
Excerpted from: McArthur, Tom. The Oxford Concise Companion to the English Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged poetry, professional development, term of art
Here is a reading on Rene Descartes along with its vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I’ve had exactly one request for this material in 17 years of teaching, which is why it exists. If, like me, you’ve had students in special education classes who were there on account of acting-out behavior, and not because they were learning disabled. I prepared this for just such a student, who was exceptionally intelligent, but suffered from an inordinate love of fisticuffs.
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.
“Beryl Bainbridge: (1934-2010) English novelist. Bainbridge’s novels are distinguished by the uncommon psychological acuity with which she treats ordinary people in working class environments. Much of her macabre, black-comic fiction draws on her reflections and memories of growing up in Liverpool under the shadow of World War II. Typically, her first novel, A Weekend with Claude (1967), centers on an act of violence. Another Part of the Wood (1968), examines the death of a child which occurred because negligent adults were preoccupied with their own sexual concerns. Harriet Said (1972), begins with an accidental killing by a thirteen-year-old girl. Bainbridge’s comic irony and sense of destructive forces lurking beneath the familiar are again evident in The Bottle Factory Outing (1974), Sweet William ((1975), A Quiet Life (1976), and Injury Time (1976). Young Adolf (1978) imaginatively reconstructs Hitler’s probable visit to his half-brother in Liverpool in 1912 (to avoid conscription), revealing the violence, paranoia, and posturing of the young man, who craved affection but did nothing to win it. Winter Garden (1980) is a thriller about an English artist who disappears in Russia. In 1984, Bainbridge published the diary she kept during the filming of a BBC television series in 1983, entitled English Journey, or, The Road to Milton Keynes. Her subsequent works of fiction are Filthy Lucre, or the Tragedy or Ernest Ledwhistle (1986) and An Awfully Big Adventure (1989).”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
For Week II of Women’s History Month 2020, here is a reading on Toni Morrison with 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.
“What was George Sand’s real name? The French author of Consuelo (1842) was born Amadine Lucie Aurore Dupin.”
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, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, readings/research, women's history
OK, here is an Everyday Edit worksheet on Pocahontas for Women’s History Month 2020. I always like to give credit where credit is due, so let me once again remind you that you can find a yearlong supply of these worksheets at Education world, where the generous proprietors of that site give them away at no charge.
If you find typos, fix the dang things, That’s the purpose of these exercises.
“And which. And who. These forms are incorrect unless the relative pronoun has been used previously in the sentence. ‘The colt, spirited and strong, and which was unbroken, escaped from the pasture.’’John Smith, one of our leading merchants, and who fell from a window yesterday afternoon, died this morning.’ Omit the conjunction.”
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
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on syntax. I’m pretty sure I’ve published it elsewhere on this blog as part of a lesson plan. This post will make the document more easily searchable. I think you could use this document with just about any lesson on writing–either as an introduction to the topic, a short independent practice exercise to take home, or as reinforcement and retention somewhere along the line in a unit on writing.
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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