Here is a worksheet on the verb order when used with an object and an infinitive.
Doctor Zaius ordered his patient to schedule an MRI.
The hobbyist ordered some glue to build models.
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.
“Dangler (noun): A misplaced modifier or dependent segment of a sentence that often suggests an unintended or jarringly humorous meaning because of its isolation from what it properly refers to, e.g., ‘Sprinting ahead, the cave was soon only yards away’; phrase or clause separated from its antecedent; unattached modifier or participle. Also DANGLING MODIFIER
‘Strictly speaking, as Jesperson notes, strictly speaking is always a loose participle—perhaps if Newman had known anything at all about grammar he would avoided that ‘dangler’ for the title of his first book.’ Jim Quinn, American Tongue and Cheek”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on sarcasm. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of two sentences (the second of which is longish, but not insurmountable for emergent and struggling readers) and three comprehension questions. Just the bare facts about this often corrosive form of irony.
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.
“aborigine [M19th] This is a shortening of the 16th-century plural aborigines ‘original inhabitants,’ which in classical times referred to the early people of Italy and Greece. The word comes from the Latin phrase ab origine ‘from the beginning.’ Now both Aborigines and Aboriginals are standard plural forms when referring to Australian Aboriginal people, a specialized use that dates from the 1820s.”
Excerpted from: Creswell, Julia. Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
This week’s Text is a lesson on the Latin word roots duc and duct. They mean “to lead” and grow such high-frequency English words as abduct, aqueduct, induct, deduct, deduce, and seduce, all of which are included on the scaffolded worksheet, complete with Romance language cognates. I open this lesson with this context clues on the verb guide. I’d like to think that short do-now points toward the meaning of the two Latin roots under analysis in this lesson.
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.
Here is a worksheet on the verb witness when used with an object and a gerund.
Several people witnessed the train arriving.
The students witnessed a lion stalking its prey.
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.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the SAT. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of four sentences and four comprehension questions. This document may be a bit crowded in this half-page formatting. But since this document (as just about everything here on Mark’s Text Terminal) is in Microsoft Word, you can adjust it to your students’ needs.
And, editorially, I must say once again that the editors of The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy have done a nice job with their modest but effective critique of the SAT in this reading. And I like their use of purportedly in the first sentence.
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.
“Biography: Respectable pornography, thanks to which the reader can become a peeping tom on the life of a famous person.
Biography has increasingly replaced the novel as the most popular form of serious reading. While in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the novel provided the reader with a reflection of him or herself, today the biography encourages the gratuitous pleasures and self-delusion of voyeurism.”
Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston. The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes
Tagged humor, literary oddities, philosophy/religion
The Weekly Text for 5 September 2025, for some reason, is this reading on coeducation and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I have only the faintest idea of why I developed this material; I vaguely recall a class that didn’t believe me when I told them that men and women were–and are (e.g. Smith, Mount Holyoke, both part of the Five College Consortium, which includes my alma mater, Hampshire College)–educated separately in many colleges and universities in the United States.
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.
Here is a worksheet on the verb spend when used with an object and a gerund.
The students spent time researching their project.
The tourists spent the afternoon riding around in a tour bus.
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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