“Lecturer, n. One with his hand in your pocket, his tongue in your ear and his faith in your patience.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the oxymoron as a rhetorical device. This is a half-page worksheet with a one-sentence reading, a relatively uncomplicated compound, with three comprehension questions. A simple introduction to this commonly used rhetorical move, even in everyday conversation.
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.
“Metonymy: (Greek ‘name change’) A figure of speech in which the name or an attribute or a thing is substituted for the thing itself. Common examples are The Stage’ for the theatrical profession; ‘The Crown’ for the monarchy; ‘The Bench’ for the judiciary; ‘Dante’ for his works. See also ANTONOMASIA; METALEPSIS; SYNECHDOCHE.”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
Here is a context clues worksheet on the adjective assiduous. It means, as you probably know, “marked by careful unremitting attention or persistent application,” e.g. “an assiduous book collector,” “tended her garden with assiduous attention.” I stipulate that this isn’t exactly a high-frequency word in English. It is, however, a useful one.
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.
“A La Recherche du Temps Perdu: A work of genius written in bed. It opens with the narrator tucked between his sheets. It is rarely read for any length of time on a mattress.
It is also rarely read, but is often talked about and has had a major impact on many people who haven’t read it, if only because of the strain of waiting for Marcel Proust to be mentioned in conversation, which can happen as many as three times in a year. The educated person may the be required to make a comment on what they have only read about.
That literature could mean, as the French novelist Julian Gracq once complained, books more talked about than read indicates the extent to which language today may be used more to obscure and control than to communicate.”
Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston. The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.
Here is a reading on time as a philosophical concept, along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. The reading invokes Kant, Leibniz, and Newton; as I recall, I wrote this about ten years ago for a student interested in philosophy. I don’t know that I or anyone else as looked at it since. Here it is for your use. Remember that like everything else on Mark’s Text Terminal, these are Microsoft Word documents, so you can tailor them to your students’ needs.
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.
Grammar: Rules of a language governing its phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics; also, a written summary of such rules. The first Europeans to write grammar texts were the Greeks, notably the Alexandrians of the 1st century BC. The Romans applied the Greek grammatical system to Latin, The works of the Latin Grammarians Donatus (4th century BC) and Priscian (6th century) were widely used to teach grammar in Medieval Europe. By 1700, grammars of 61 vernacular languages had been printed. These were mainly used for teaching and were intended to reform or standardize language. In the 19th-20th centuries linguists began studying languages to trace their evolution father than to prescribe correct usage. Descriptive linguists (see Ferdinand de Saussure) studied spoken language by collecting and analyzing sample sentences. Transformational grammarians (see Noam Chomsky) examined the underlying structure of language (see generative grammar). The older approach to grammar as a body of rules needed to speak and write correctly is still the basis of primary and secondary teaching.
Excerpted/Adapted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
On the first day of a very badly needed spring break, here is a worksheet on the Latin word roots ram and rami. They mean branch. This root does not produce a bumper crop of high-frequency English words: it gives us ramification, and therefore ramify–or vice versa, because there is a good chance the verb emerged first. This is a Latin root, and as we know from history, the Romans loved action. However, this root also sprouts biramous (“having two branches”) ramus (“a projecting part, elongated process, or branch,” “the posterior more or less vertical part on each side of the lower jaw that articulates with the skull,” and “a branch of a nerve”), which may actually have use for students interested in entering healthcare professions, and ramose (“consisting of or having branches”).
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.
“auxiliary: In grammar, a verb that is subordinate to the main lexical verb in a clause. Auxiliaries can convey distinctions of tense, aspect, mood, person, and number. In Germanic languages, such as English and Romance languages such as French, an auxiliary verb occurs with the main verb in the form of an infinitive or a participle.”
Excerpted/Adapted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
From Paul Brians’ book Common Errors in English Usage, here is a worksheet on differentiating and using properly the adjectives ignorant and stupid. This is a full-page worksheet with a two-sentence reading and ten modified cloze exercises.
Given the current state of American culture and society, I would think this would be timely, and therefore useful, material. But that’s just the perspective of my currently jaundiced eye. On a brighter note, and to give credit where it is so amply due, you should know that Professor Brians allows access to his usage manual at no cost; you can find the webscript (can I coin that portmanteau?) at the Washington State University website.
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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