“Auctioneer, n. The man who proclaims with a hammer that he has picked a pocket with his tongue.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities, united states history
Because I find it impossible not to do so, I must again (as I will in all of these posts) credit and thank the erudite and generous Paul Brians: erudite because, well, buy his book; generous because he makes his book, Common Errors in English Usage, from which the attached document is adapted, available at his Washington State University webpage.
Here is a worksheet on the use of the noun mass and adjective massive. This is a full-page worksheet with a reading of three sentences and ten modified cloze exercises. This is, therefore, relatively heavily supported. Since it is in Microsoft Word, you can modify it as you wish or for your students needs.
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.
“Didactic (adjective): Demonstrating intend to teach or edify; purposively instructive or informative; excessively earnest or pedantic, especially in a narrow, self-righteous way; moralistic. Adverb: didactically; noun: didact, didacticism, didactics.
‘One is literally fabulous. The other makes use of a dry, rather didactic style in which the detail is as precisely observed as if the author were writing a manual for the construction of a solar heating unit.’ Gore Vidal, Matters of Fact and Fiction”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
I’m sure it appears elsewhere on this blog, probably as part of a lesson, but since I have practically infinite storage space on this website, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the intransitive verb in grammar and usage. If nothing else, this will be a more easily searchable post and spare the reader the indignity and waste of time searching for it elsewhere.
This is a half-page worksheet with a four-sentence reading and three comprehension questions. Given the relatively abstract nature of the material, I think the editors of The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, once again, have done an admirable reifying this concept and bringing it down to earth for younger learners.
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.
This week’s Text is the second lesson plan of the Introduction to Writing Sentences Unit . This lesson introduces phrases. This lesson opens with this worksheet on the use of adjectives adverse and averse; this is a full-page worksheet with a three-sentence reading and ten modified cloze exercises. These are a couple of relatively high-frequency words in educated discourse, so this is a vocabulary building in addition to its clear purpose in inculcating the concept of usage. It’s highly supported, but you can easily modify this Microsoft Word document.
This is the worksheet at the center of this lesson, It’s scaffolded, with some proofreading and copyediting exercises at the beginning, then independent practice working with phrases in sentences. This learning support on phrases, adapted from Grant Barrett’s Perfect English Grammar (Berkeley: Zephyros Press, 2016), should ease the process of completing this work. And here, finally, is the teacher’s copy of the worksheet.
Incidentally, I’d like to praise (not that anyone has asked me to do so) Grant Barrett’s book Perfect English Grammar (Berkeley: Zephyros Press, 2016). Over the past 35 years, I have looked at or read cover to cover an enormous number of grammar and style manuals. For the mechanics of writing, simply but effectively stated, I think Mr. Barrett’s book is the best in print at the moment.
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.
Once again, from Paul Brians’s find book Common Errors in English Usage, here is a worksheet on the use of the verb manufacture and the noun manufacturer. This is a full-page worksheet with a reading of two sentences and ten modified cloze exercises. This is, in other words, a heavily supported document. Like just about everything else at Mark’s Text Terminal, however, this is a Microsoft Word document you may manipulate freely for the needs of your students.
And let me mention, once more, that Paul Brians generously allows access to his usage manual at his Washington State University webpage.
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.
When I taught or co-taught global studies, it was a topic that the curricula, unlike the often superficial passes through other important historical processes, focused on at relatively inordinate length, so this Cultural Literacy on the concept of an indulgence, at three sentences and three questions on a half-page document, was insufficient.
Still, it opens the door to discuss this weird medieval financial instrument–swapping earthly gains (often obtained through exploitative and violent means) for heavenly salvation. As the reading observes, indulgences were one of the things that infuriated Martin Luther and therefore began The Reformation. They also demonstrate, should anyone care to take a discussion in this direction, the apparently bottomless human capacity for self-delusion, corruption, and folly.
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.
“Dichotomy (noun): A division or counterposing into two groups or positions, usually contradictory or mutually exclusive; a specified, vis–a-vis contrast. Adjective: dichotomous; adverb: dichotomously; noun: dichotomousness, dichotomist; verb; dichotomize.
‘I submit to you staffers that the solution establishes itself before our very eyes: namely, that an absolute—in any particular field—must be presented as a dichotomy! Yes, if one mother company, such as our Vanity, could confront the public with with a pure dichotomy, in any particular product, it would gain virtual monopoly there. Yes, and we will present such a dichotomy.’ Terry Southern, The Magic Christian”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
Alright, it’s time to roll up my sleeves and start preparing this long run of posts to publish as the entire Introduction to Writing Sentences unit.
So here is the first lesson plan on understanding the parts of speech as well as the elements of a sentence, that is the subject and the predicate. This lesson takes students through the process, first as a structured activity using mentor texts, then independent work, writing grammatically complete sentences with a recognition of their subjects and predicates.
Accordingly, I hope, this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the parts of a sentence opens this lesson. This scaffolded worksheet is the primary work for this lesson, and guides students through the work, both supported and independent, of understanding the parts of sentence by actually working with them. This learning support attends the worksheet. More generally, here are a glossary on the parts of speech, which is adapted from William Strunk and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style (New York: Longman, 2000), that chestnut of composition classes everywhere at one time. Finally, here is a learning support on the verb to be, conjugated. The verb to be, known as a copula, is everywhere in the English language. It is vital that our students know how to conjugate this extremely common verb in English.
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.
Once again, in an adaptation from Paul Brians’ book Common Errors in English Usage (to which he generously offers free access at his Washington State University web page), here is a worksheet on the use of the noun majority. This noun, one of a few of its type I imagine, governs both the use of the singular and plural verb. And that is what Professor Brians seeks to clarify in this passage.
Students are called upon to evaluate five teacher-authored sentences, then compose fives sentences of their own with majority used properly.
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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