“psychosocial stressor: n. Any life event or change, such as divorce, marriage, bereavement, loss or change of a job, or moving house, that causes stress and may be associated with the onset or deterioration of a mental disorder. See also adjustment disorder.”
Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
Tagged health, professional development, social-emotional learning
“Sulphuric Acid * Iron Oxide * Sodium Carbonate * Sodium Nitrate * Liquor Hepatis * Red Pulvis Solaris * Black Pulvis Solaris
The alchemist’s vocabulary does not always translate directly into a modern formula. They were keen on Natron, which was a generic word that included both the salts of sodium carbonate and sodium nitrate. Vitriol, however, is what we know as sulphuric acid and Aqua Fortis was nitric acid. Black pulvis solaris was formed from ground black antimony (stibnite–a sulphide of antimony) mixed with ground sulphur. Red pulvis solaris was a mixture of mercury (which could be extracted by heating cinnabar) and sulphur.
The alchemists also made a strong connection between the seven prime metals and the planets. The sun was linked to gold, the moon to silver, Mars to iron, Mercury to quicksilver, Saturn to lead, Jupiter to tin, and Venus to copper.”
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.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged literary oddities, science literacy
“Malediction (noun): An invoking of evil or harm upon somebody or something; pronounced curse; evil talk or slander. Adjective: maledictive, maledictory.
‘He caught up the empty pewter mug at his right and threw it at the clumsy lad with a malediction.'”
Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“Realpolitik: (Germ., politics of realism) Term coined in 1859 by the liberal journalist and historian Rochau, to describe Bismarck’s policy. Bismarck believed that a naked struggle for power and a ruthless pursuit of self-interest were the only realistic options for a great state.”
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged foreign languages/linguistics, readings/research, term of art
“If you think you can think about a thing inextricably attached to something else without thinking of the thing which it is attached to, then you have a legal mind.”
Quoted in Thurman W. Arnold, The Symbols of Government
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
“A ‘story’ (fictional or actual) involves an Agent who Acts to achieve a Goal in a recognizable Setting by the use of certain Means. What drives the story, what makes it worth telling, is Trouble: some misfit between Agent, Acts, Goals, Settings, and Means.”
Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.
Alright, this week’s Text is a lesson plan on the art of summarizing which is part of a bigger unit on argumentation that I wrote–but used only once–a couple of years ago.
This context clues worksheet on the verb concede (which is used transitively, but can be used intransitively, according to Merriam-Webster’s, by writing to make concession) opens the lesson. I use this exemplar of a summary, drawn from the book that informs this unit, Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing (New York: Norton, 2018) as a learning support and model text. This learning support on the verbs used in the rhetorical figures of argumentation supplies students with the vocabulary they require to postulate and write sound arguments. Here are the two exercises for summarizing that are at the center of this lesson. Finally, here is the worksheet for this lesson that contains the full text of the exemplar linked to above.
And that’s it for another week at Mark’s Text Terminal. Enjoy the weekend.
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.
[In this squib, Stanley Kaufmann alludes to Truman Capote’s famously snarky remark about Jack Kerouac’s prose, to wit, “That’s not writing, that’s typing”.]
“One can say of this book–with sufficient truth to make it worth saying: ‘This isn’t writing. It’s research.'”
Stanley Kaufmann, The New Republic
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities
“euphony: Literally the property of ‘sounding well.’ But used at one time of principle equivalent to that of ‘ease or articulation’: thus it was for reasons of ‘euphony’ that one consonant undergoes assimilation to another, or that successive syllables are matched in vowel harmony.”
Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“Articulate the word ‘Sun’ and you soon find yourself thinking of the Moon. Man and Woman, Love and Hate, Right and Wrong, Farmer and Shepherd, Left and Right, Queen and King, North and South, Positive and Negative, Heaven and Hell, East and West, Life and Death, Victory and Defeat, Earth and Sky, Sunrise and Sunset. So, two is an inauspicious number in its cracking of unity.”
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.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged literary oddities
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