“Copy Editing: The reading and correcting of manuscripts before setting of type, usually entailing attention to grammar, spelling, punctuation, style and format consistency, and factual particulars such as names and places mentioned. Noun: copy editor; Verb: copy edit. ALSO COPY READING”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
From Paul Brians’ excellent book Common Errors in English Usage (to which, to remind readers once again, he allows free access at his webpage at Washington State University), here is a worksheet on the use of the verbs lend and loan. This is a full-page worksheet with a reading of two long compound sentences (which might be better chopped up for emergent or struggling readers, or students for whom English is not a first language) and ten modified cloze exercises.
The gist of the work here involves students judging whether both of these are best used as verbs, or if lend is the verb and loan is the object being lent–and therefore only used as a noun.
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.
Aries (Ram) * Taurus (Bull) * Gemini (Twins) * Cancer (Crab) * Leo (Lion) * Virgo (Virgin) * Libra (Scales) * Scorpio (Scorpion) * Sagittarius (Archer) * Capricorn (Goat) * Aquarius (Water Carrier) * Pisces (Fish)
The Zodiac is a very old concept, which has impregnated our thought patterns for thousands of years. In essence it was the observation of the sun’s circular path through the heavens (as viewed from the earth) and the division of this into twelve equal sections of 30 degrees to make a complete circuit of 360 degrees. Like so much of our world, the start date is spring, the vernal equinox of 21 March, so Aries (21 March-20 April) must always start the cycle.
The symbols chosen by the Sumerian astrologers and their imaginative pattern-making of sacred shapes from the most prominent stars passed seamlessly into Babylonian, Egyptian, Hindu, and Greek thought—notably through the teachings of a pair of well-traveled Greeks, Eudoxus of Cnidus and from the Egyptian-Greek scholar Ptolemy, whose Almagest colonized the imagination of both Islam and Christendom.
But just to read the Sumerian names is to stand in witness of an impressive piece of 5,000-year-old living continuity: Luhunga (Farmer) is Aries; Gu Anna (Bull of Heaven) is Taurus; Mastabba Bagal (Great Twins) is Gemini; Al-Lul (Crayfish) is Cancer; Urgula (Lion) is Leo; Ab Sin (virgin land) is Virgo; Zib Baanna (scales) is Libra; Girtab (Scorpion) is Scorpio; Pabilsag (soldier) is Sagittarius; Suhurmas (goat-fish) is Capricorn; Gu La (‘Great One) is Aquarius, the water bearer during the winter rains; and Dununu (fish cord) is Pisces.
Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.
Once again, adapted from the pages of Barbara Ann Kipfer’s fascinating reference book The Order of Things, here is a lesson plan on the Zodiac with its accompanying worksheet with a list of the Zodiac Signs as a reading and five comprehension questions.
As I do when I post these lessons, I want to emphasize that I designed them for struggling and emergent readers, or for students for whom English is not a first language. This work calls upon students to perform an analysis in two symbolic systems–numbers and words–of the material on the worksheet, something with which many students I have served over the years struggled.
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.
“The Labyrinth of Solitude (El laberinto de la soledad, 1950; tr 1961): A book by Octavio Paz. This penetrating essay on Mexican history has probably been more widely read and is thus more influential than any of Paz’s other essays or poetry. In search of the meaning of the Mexican and, by extension, the Latin American experience, Paz singles out the conquest of the Indians by Spanish invaders as the moment the true Mexico became isolated and obscured by masks. Silence, dissimulation, machismo, hermeticism, violence, and the cult of death are the masks adopted by the Mexican to disguise his fundamental historical solitude. Paz argues, however, that solitude has become a universal part of the human condition and that all men, like the poet himself, must become conscious of this condition in order to find, in the plentitude of love and creative work, a glimpse of the way out of the labyrinth of solitude.
In the revised and supplemented edition of 1985, Paz clarifies his view of Mexican culture and history, and deals with U.S.-Mexico relations. He also reexamines the dichotomy between the “two Mexicos,” the “developed” and the “underdeveloped,” and finds that the distinction is itself an imposition of the former upon the latter. He discusses the “other” Mexico as not only a tradition and a culture, but as representing a philosophical “Other,” like the other within.
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Uruguay. This is a full-page worksheet with a three-sentence reading and four comprehension questions.
Incidentally, should you be interested in delving deeper into Uruguayan politics and society, I published this blog post on Tupac Amaru II, who was the namesake of a Uruguayan revolutionary group the Tupamaros, whose work resisting a repressive governments led the way to Uruguay becoming a “full democracy,” indeed, one of the strongest democracies in the Americas.
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.
For the final Friday of Hispanic Heritage Month 2024, here is the post for this month that bears the scantest relation to Hispanic History: a a reading on the World’s Columbian Exhibition of 1893 along with its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. As this event’s name indicates (and if you’ve read Erik Larsen’s fascinating book The Devil in the White City, you know most if not all there is to know about the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition), it is related to Christopher Columbus, to wit the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the “New World.”
Certainly Spain’s arrival in the New World basically begins what we might consider Hispanic History, that’s how we come by the word Hispanic, after all. So there is marginal relevance here. I don’t know, this event seems like the conquistador’s round of self-congratulation for a job of genocide well done.
But as I said at the outset of this month, I am woefully under-inventoried where materials related to Hispanic History is concerned.
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.
“Guillen de Castro y Bellvis: (1569-1631) Spanish playwright. Of his 50-odd plays, the best remembered is Las mocedades del Cid (“The Youth of the Cid”; c.1599), on which Pierre Corneille based his Le Cid (1637). Castro’s play is notable for its naturalistic dialogue. He was one of the earliest playwrights to deal with the difficulties of marriage, as in Los mal casadas de Valencia (“The Unhappy Marriages of Valencia”). He drew heavily on traditional Castilian ballads and based three of his plays on novels by Miguel de Cervantes.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, hispanic history, readings/research
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Sancho Panza, Don Quixote de la Mancha’s sidekick in Cervantes’ masterpiece (which I reread constantly) Don Quixote. This is a half-page worksheet with a two-sentence reading and two comprehension questions. As is characteristic of the work of the editors of The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, this is a cogent, informative squib on an important character in the history of literature.
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 Santa Fe Trail. William Becknell pioneered this road in 1821 as a commercial route between St. Louis, Missouri and Santa Fe, New Mexico (which wasn’t, of course, a state at that time–it became a state in 1912). Along with the freight that moved along this road, inevitably, settlers began to follow. This was the beginning of the United States’ endeavor to help itself to territory that was at the time part of Mexico–which of course culminated in the Mexican-American War.
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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