Monthly Archives: July 2021

A Learning Support on Gerunds and Pronouns

Here is a learning support on gerunds and pronouns. This is about a half-page of text, so there is room (and the latitude, since, like just about everything on this blog, this is a Microsoft Word document you can manipulate for your particular use) to make a worksheet of this should you see fit.

Basically, the text here explains the proper use of possessive pronouns following gerunds. It’s both simple and complicated at once, but as Paul Brians explains (this is drawn from his book Common Errors in English Usage), the advice in the passage will improve the quality of student 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.

Kin Hubbard on…A Visit to the Office of a Professional

“Nothing is as irritating as the fellow who chats pleasantly while he’s overcharging.”

Kin Hubbard

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.

Obscure (adj)

Here is a context clues worksheet on the adjective obscure. This is another of those polysemous words whose array of meanings may surprise you.

In everyday discourse, we mostly use it to mean “not readily understood or clearly expressed.” But it can also mean “dark, dim, shrouded in or hidden by darkness, not clearly seen or easily distinguished, faint”; “relatively unknown,  remote, secluded, not prominent or famous”; and, interestingly, “constituting the unstressed vowel \ə\ or having unstressed \ə\ as its value.” Obscure can also be used as a verb, but that’s another worksheet and another post.

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.

Funk Art

“Funk Art: A term coined in the 1960s to describe a class of art that emerged in the San Francisco Bay area. It was often witty, sometimes deliberately distasteful, with a diversity of styles ranging from comic-strip derivations to William Wiley’s use of found objects. Funk artists looked to popular culture rather than traditional canons of fine art.”

Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.

Cultural Literacy: Fine Arts

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of fine arts. This is a very short document: a one-sentence reading and two comprehension questions.

In other words, the barest of introductions to the idea of fine arts–but an introduction nonetheless.

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.

Term of Art: Word Recognition

“word recognition: An ability to apply any number of strategies to recognize and understand a word. Word recognition strategies include:

  • configuration—using visual cues such as the shape and size of the word
  • context analysis—using surrounding information (including pictures) to predict a word
  • sight words—instant recognition of a word without further analysis
  • phonemic analysis—‘sounding out’ a word
  • syllabication—dividing a word into syllables
  • structural analysis—using morphological information such as prefixes, suffixes, and roots”

Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.

Common Errors in English Usage: Ethics (n), Morale (n) and Moral (adj)

Here is a worksheet on using the nouns ethics and morale, and the adjective moral. As always, this worksheet, which consists of ten modified cloze exercises, comes from Paul Brians’ book Common Errors in English Usage, available–amazingly–in its entirety on the Washington State University website.

These words, and the concepts they represent, I submit, are things kids should know, understand, and be able to apply both in specific and general discourse.

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.

Libertins

“Libertins: A sect of French freethinkers and skeptics of the 17th and 18th centuries, precursors of Voltaire and the encyclopedists. Advocates of total freedom of thought and conscience, the Libertins questioned the doctrines and morality of all received religion and were continually accused of atheism and immorality. The greatest religious thinkers of the day, including Bossuet and Pascal, denounced their views, and ultimately the Libertins’ own poor conduct discredited their name.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

Third World

Here is a reading on the Third World along with its vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.

For the record, I disdain this term, which smacks of colonialism and in fact, as far as I am concerned, is a legacy of colonialism. The colonial powers expropriated wealth and labor from their colonies, then saddled them with a moniker that makes it sound like poverty and underdevelopment is somehow their own fault. If this reading didn’t point out this term’s problems, however blandly (“In addition, some artists and intellectuals adopted the term Third World to describe the common history of imperialism and decolonization shared by many countries in the group” and “Though some now regard the term as insensitive, it remains in use to describe impoverished parts of the globe….”), I probably wouldn’t publish it at all. That said, the reading does open a door to a critical discussion of colonialism and its atrocious legacy.

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.

Boilerplate

“Boilerplate (noun): Standard, stereotypical news stories, features, etc., syndicated to newspapers; ready-to-print copy; pedestrian or hackneyed writing (from the printer’s matrix or plate form). Adj. boilerplate

‘In newspaper jargon, you might call all this the boiler plate of the novel—durable informative matter set up in stereotype and sold to country newspapers as filler to eke out a scarcity of local news, i.e of ‘plot.’ And the novel, like a newspaper boiler plate, contains not only a miscellany of odd facts but household hints and how-to-do-it instructions (you can learn how to make strawberry jam from Anna Karenina and how to reap a field and hunt ducks).’ Mary McCarthy, On the Contrary”

Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.