“Frieze: The middle section of the entablature between the architrave and the cornice, where relief sculpture was sometimes applied. Also, in interiors, the broad band between wall paneling and ceiling.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
OK, last but not least today, here is a context clues worksheet on the noun plague. It means, in the context in which it is presented on this half-page document, “an epidemic disease causing a high rate of mortality.”
I wrote this, I am sure, to introduce the word to students ahead of a lesson on the European Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century. The context is reasonably strong, but it can always use a little help. So if you rewrite this, I would appreciate seeing your version of it. In fact, I will add it to this post. Incidentally, the bubonic plague, the cause of the Black Death, remains alive and well and occasionally breaks out, as it has intermittently in Madagascar, among other places around the globe.
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.
“Figurative Language: Language which uses figures of speech; for example, metaphor, simile, alliteration (qq.v). Figurative language must be distinguished from literal (q.v.) language. ‘He hared down the street’ or ‘He ran like a hare down the street’ are figurative (metaphor and simile respectively). ‘He ran very quickly down the street’ is literal. See HYPERBOLE; METONYMY; SYNECHDOCHE.”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, poetry, readings/research
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the phrase “get someone’s goat.” This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of four sentences and three comprehension questions.
As you know, this expression means, as the reading has it, “to make someone annoyed or angry.” The expression originates from a tradition in horse racing involving placing a goat, which was believed to exercise a calming influence over high-strung thoroughbreds, in the stall with a race horse. This explanation for the expression originated, evidently, with H.L. Mencken. However, there is reason to doubt the legitimacy of the origin story for this expression. Wherever it originated, this idiom has a rich history.
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.
Christopher Lasch: (1932-1994) American social critic and cultural historian. Lasch, a professor of history, is best known for his penetrating analyses of contemporary American cultural and political phenomena. In The Culture of Narcissism (1979), which became an unlikely best-seller, Lasch examined the effects of an increasingly self-centered worldview on the family and the community. He consistently challenged contemporary Americans’ reliance on experts to determine standards of behavior and thought. The Minimal Self (1984) examines individual freedom and privacy in the light of the agencies for social control in our lives. Lasch’s last work, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1994), took its ironic title from Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses (1930) and argued that the greatest threat to democracy is now from a technocratic oligarchy at the top and not from revolution from below.
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Here is a reading on sulfa drugs and World War II along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.
While this material probably qualifies as minutia in the grand sweep of the history of World War II, it is in fact an important moment in the war. This reading is an exposition of cause and effect: by mass chemoprophylaxis (the act of administering medication in the hopes of preventing disease spread) with sulfa drugs, the US Navy saved an estimated 1 million man days and between $50 million and $100 million in 1944 dollars. Ultimately, penicillin replaced sulfadiazine, or sulfa drugs. It is just this kind of cause-and-effect scenario, in my observation in New York State, that tends to inform questions on high-stakes social studies tests.
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.
“Casket for Coffin. A needless euphemism affected by undertakers.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
From Paul Brians’ book Common Errors in English Usage (which he generously makes available for free on the Washington State University website), here is a worksheet on using first-person voice in academic prose.
From my first English Composition course at a community college in Vermont to my master’s thesis at the University of Wisconsin, I always accepted as axiomatic that one does not use first-person pronouns in academic expository writing. In fact, while writing medical notes when I worked in a hospital, we were instructed by nursing managers to eschew the first-person pronoun in favor of referring to oneself as “this author,” as in “This author observed the patient…” etc. Moreover, teaching English at the secondary level, I continued to hew to this rule out of habit and deference the loosely held usage rules of the department.
Professor Brians, interestingly, urges writers to use the first person when it is appropriate–by which he apparently means along a fairly broad spectrum of usage in prose. I expect this will occasion some remark. That’s good, because one’s growth as a teacher certainly involves kicking around something like this. In any case, I wrote this worksheet with the idea that using the first-person pronouns is relatively easy, and not using them can be difficult. Accordingly, this work in this document calls upon students to rewrite ten sentences that are in the first person to eliminate that voice.
However, this worksheet is, like most of the downloadable material you will find on Mark’s Text Terminal, formatted in Microsoft Word, so you may do with it as your or your students’ needs require.
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 Fortiori From the stronger: with greater reason, or being logically a more obvious truth if a preceding assertion is true; by inference; all the more so.
‘Marlow’s interrupting voice also deepens our admiration for Conrad’s narrative technique. That is, it is an artifice which intermittently calls attention to itself. So also, a fortiori, is the obtrusive and disjunctive surface treatment of Molly Bloom’s maundering mind.’ Annie Dillard, Living by Fiction”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
OK, on a cool Monday morning in Salisbury, Massachusetts, here is a worksheet on the Greek root ana-. It means up, back, again, against, and throughout. This is a very productive root in English; it produces such high-frequency words as analogy, analyze, and anatomy.
These are unquestionably words students must know before graduating high school. But so, I would argue, are a couple of others that grow from this root, to wit, anagram and anathema.
.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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