“Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach’s St. Matthew Passion on a ukulele: the instrument is too crude for the work, for the audience and for the performer.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
“As for That, or If. ‘I do not know as he is living.’ This error is not very common among those who can write at all, but sometimes one sees it in high place.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged diction/grammar/style/usage
Here is a somewhat-less-than-distinguished short worksheet on differentiating the use of that and which. As the worksheet’s text explains, these exercises are limited to the use of these two words as pronouns. If you look them up in the dictionary you’ll find usage advise on relative or restrictive clauses. I’m developing material on those areas of English usage, so stay tuned here.
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.
“Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail.”
Mark Twain in a Speech (1900)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“Assonance: Sometimes called “vocalic rhyme,” it consists of the repetition of similar vowel sounds, usually close together, to achieve a similar effect of euphony. There is a kind of drowsy sonority in the following lines from Tennyson’s Lotos-Eaters which is assonantal:
‘The Lotos blooms below the barren peak:
The Lotos blooms by every winding creek:
All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone
Thro’ every hollow cave and alley lone,
Round and round the spicy downs the yellow Lotos-dust is blown.’
In Strange Meeting Wilfred Owen uses a vocalic or half rhyme to similar effect:
‘It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through grantires which titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.'”
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 diction/grammar/style/usage, poetry, term of art
“Participial Phrase: A present or past participle with accompanying modifiers, objects, or complements. The buzzards, circling with sinister determination, squawked loudly.”
Excerpted from: Strunk, William Jr., and E.B. White. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition. New York: Longman, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where one question grew before.”
“Evolution of the Scientific Point of View” (1908)
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
“How were critics Mark and Carl Van Doren related? They were brothers. Both were members of the faculty of Columbia University. Carl from 1911 to 1930 and Mark from 1920 to 1959.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“Article. A good and useful word, but used without meaning by shopkeepers; as, ‘A good article of vinegar,’ for a good vinegar.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged diction/grammar/style/usage, humor, literary oddities
“Local Color: System of representing the color of an object which begins with its hue and adds shade or lightness by the addition of black or white pigment to give a more naturalistic appearance. Pure or shaded local color was used almost exclusively until the late 19th century, when the Impressionists discovered that the brain blends contrasting hues into vibrant impressions of actual color.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
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