Monthly Archives: July 2025

Cultural Literacy: Irony

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on irony. This is a half-page worksheet with a two-sentence reading and two comprehension questions–just the basics, in other words. This is useful word and concept in particular for reviewing books and movies.

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.

Discursive

“Discursive (adjective): Covering a range of topics or discoursing freely and broadly, moving from subject to subject; characterized by rational analysis rather than intuition. Adverb: discursively; noun: discursiveness.

‘He published some of the best reporting—of an unofficial and personal kind—that was written about the war, and he elicited from Augustus John his delightful discursive memoirs, in which history is unimportant and chronology does not exist.’ Edmund Wilson, Classics and Commercials”

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

Cultural Literacy: Euphemism

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on euphemism, which I think might be useful in writing reviews, especially since reviews often use euphemisms so soften harsh judgments. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of two sentences (the first of which is a compound separated by a semicolon, and may be best shortened for emergent readers and users of English as a second language) and three comprehension questions.

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.

The Doubter’s Companion: Bees

Bees: In his Philosophical Dictionary Voltaire points out that bees seem superior to humans because one of their secretions is useful. Nothing a human secretes is of use; quite the contrary. Whatever we produce makes us disagreeable to be around.

The bee’s social organization also invites comparisons. If the queen were to be removed and the drones were able to convince the worker bees to go on working while they stepped in as managers, what would happen to our supply of honey?

Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston. The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.

The Weekly Text, 4 July 2025: Lesson Two of the Writing Reviews Unit

The second lesson plan of the Writing Reviews Unit is about argumentation, which any review will need to do well to convince its readers. In fact, when I first began working on these materials in 2006 or so, I conceived them as an introduction to the kind of academic writing kids really need to know how to do before they graduate high school.

So this scaffolded worksheet seeks to assist students in developing their own understanding of the difference between a quarrel and an argument in order to clarify the rhetorical and epistemological purpose of an argument. You might find the the teacher’s copy of the worksheet useful.

This lesson opens with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of to damn with faint praise, the use of which in a review I will take as a given.

Happy Fourth of July! I bid you a restful day and evening.

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.