“Sitting next a table of visiting Midwestern governors in a New York nightclub, Mrs. Parker summed up their conversation: ‘Sounds like over-written Sinclair Lewis.’”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold speech,” delivered to the audience at the 1896 national convention of the Democratic Party. Bryan is often used as a metaphor for the 19th-century American Populist movement–known as the People’s Party–and indeed the party nominated Bryan as its candidate in the 1896 presidential election.
The speech itself is both a representative ideological screed of populism, but also one of the classic pieces of American rhetoric. Bryan was a gasbag, so this speech is a stem-winder. As an illustration of certain tendencies in American political discourse, this speech is nonpareil.
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.
“Complected. Anticipatory past participle of the verb “to complect.” Let us wait for that.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
It’s not much used any more (though maybe it should be), but here, nonetheless, is a context clues worksheet on the noun buffoon. Did you know it means “a ludicrous figure,” “clown,” and “a gross and usually ill-educated or stupid person”? If so, you probably understand why I might urge a return of its use to, you know, comment appropriately on our time.
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.
“Linear Perspective: The means of delineating three-dimensional objects on a picture plane by rendering them in terms of receding planes. The simplest form is one-point perspective.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
OK, once more, last and probably least this morning, here is a worksheet on the verb deny as it is used with a gerund. I don’t deny doubting the value of this document.
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.
“problem of induction: Problem of justifying the inference from the characteristics of observed instances of a general concept to unobserved instances of the same concept. For example, if all emeralds I have ever seen have been green, what entitles me to draw the inference that all emeralds are green, given that my past observations do not strictly entail (or deductively imply) that are emeralds are green? May we infer that the characteristics of a sample taken from a population are characteristics of the entire population? A quality-control engineer who looks at a sample of 100 lightbulbs produced by a particular manufacturing process and finds that five are defective may conclude that 5% of all bulbs that have been and will be produced by the process are defective. For the engineers inference to be justified, two criteria that must be met are (1) that the sample be random (i.e. every subset of 100 bulbs has an equal chance of being selected for the examination), and (2) that the sample be sufficiently large (in a mathematically precise sense). See also statistics.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
Here is a reading on truth along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. This is an Intellectual Devotional reading on truth as a problem in philosophy; like most of the readings I’ve developed into avenues of inquiry, this is a good general introduction to the problem of truth. But make no mistake: truth is a complex and often tendentious topic in philosophical discussions. Student interested in the topic will soon need something more substantial than this set of documents.
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.
“Aside (noun): An utterance in theatrical dialogue directed to the audience, but supposedly not heard by other actors in their roles; words spoken in low tones or confidentially; passing, private, or covert comment; personal digression.
‘Mr. Wilson somehow packs his play with comic asides that cover phenomena as varied as Eskimos, U.F.O.s, Betty Grable, botany, Columbia Records, and Karl Marx.’ Frank Rich, The New York Times”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
With text from Paul Brians’ book Common Errors in English Usage, here is a worksheet differentiating the use of importantly and important. The first word is an adverb, the second an adjective; the reading does a nice job of guiding students through the differences in these two words and how to use them.
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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