Mark’s Text Terminal bids happy holidays to all its readers around the world.
The Weekly Text for 19 December 2026 (published on Monday, 15 December) and the five posts that accompany are the last posts of this year. I’m taking a two week break for the holidays. On 9 January, new posts return to the blog.
Happy Holidays!
Posted in Announcement
“A democracy is a government in the hands of men of low birth, no property, and vulgar employments.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
Here is a worksheet on the verb teach when used with an object and an infinitive.
Carlos teaches his dog Sidney to fetch the ball.
The boy taught his mother to speak English more fluently.
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.
“What was the interminable law case in Dickens’ Bleak House (1852-53)? Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, a case stemming from a dispute about distribution of an estate.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of a status quo. This Latinism–which means “the state in which”–is a high frequency term in English, especially among educated people. In any event, this is a half-page worksheet with a two sentences and three comprehension questions.
The first sentence is a compound with a colon in the middle of it. If that’s too much for emergent readers or users of English as a second language, simply remove the colon, replace it with a period, and write “For example” in front of the quote that follows.
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.
“Ashcan School: (Also called The Eight and The New York Realists) A term applied, loosely and belatedly, to a group of American realist painters. Although they never actually formed a school, eight painters—Robert Henri (1865-1929), John Sloan (1871-1951), Maurice Prendergast (1859-1927), George Luks (1897-1933), Everett Shinn (1876-1953), William Glackens (1870-1938), Ernest Lawson (1873-1939), and Arthur B. Davies (1862-1928)—held an independent exhibition at The Macbeth Gallery in New York in February 1908. Their paintings, which featured prizefights, bars, and city street scenes, departed from the artistic conventions of the turn of the century and were greeted with a storm of critical disapproval. These depictions of the working-class milieu—romantic and vital, but also squalid and brutal—shocked viewers used to genteel and fashionable pictures. The exhibition and the work of the artists, however, exerted an enormous influence on the development of American realistic painting.
The original eight came to be associated with other painters, including Walt Kuhn (1880-1949), one of the organizers of the Armory Show, and George Bellows (1882-1925), whose work, of all of the painters of the school, has perhaps retained the most critical interest.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
As we slide into the holidays (there will be no Weekly Texts for the next two Fridays), this week’s Text is a list of worksheet templates developed from Judith C. Hochman and Natalie Wexler’s excellent framework for writing instuction, The Writing Revolution (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017). First of all, here is the worksheets templates table of contents. And here are the worksheet templates themselves:
II-A*What Makes a Sentence a Sentence; Fragments, Scrambled Sentences, and Run-Ons
II-B*Piece It Together; Unscrambling Scrambled Sentences
II-C*Put the Brakes On; Correcting Run-On Sentences
II-E*What Do You Know? Developing Questions
II-F*Let’s Play Jeopardy; Giving Students the Answers and Asking for Questions
II-G*The Power of Basic Conjunctions Because, But, So
II-I*Another Name for a Noun; Appositive and Matching Appositives (Two Templates in One Document)
II-J*Put Them Together; Sentence Combining
II-L*The Power of Note-Taking–To Note-Taking Formats Distributed Over Two Worksheet Templates
II-M*Sentence with a Semicolon Stop
II-N*Sentence with a Colon Stop
II-O*Sentence Stem with a Coordinating Conjunction
II-P*Sentence Stem with an Elision for Parentheses
II-Q*Sentence Stem with Like or As to Produce an Analogy or a Simile
II-S*Which One Doesn’t Belong? Eliminating the Lease Relevant Sentence
II-T*Summary Sentence Worksheet
II-U*Select Appropriate Details from the List to Support Each Topic Sentence
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.
“Quarto: A book, measuring not larger than 9 ½ by 12 ½ inches, which is composed of sheets folded into four leaves.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Here is a worksheet on the verb require when used with an object and an infinitive.
Good manners require us to wash our hands before sitting down to dinner.
Speed limits require motorists to drive at a given rate of speed.
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.
“saliency: The relevance of an item or phenomenon to a task or activity. For example, the homework excitement that a teacher writes on the blackboard is highly salient to a student in the class, while the sounds of an activity out in the hallway are nonsalient. Problems with determining saliency (what is relevant or important to a particular task) are a significant issue in individuals with attention disorders.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
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