“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
“Small is Beautiful: An influential book (1973) by the German-born British economist E.F. Schumacher (1911-77), subtitled ‘A Study of Economics as if People Mattered.’ Schumacher argues in favor of small-scale institutions and sustainable development, and against capital-intensive, high-tech solutions, especially in the Third World. The title phrase has entered popular usage.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
“trompe l’oeil: (Fr., deceives the eye) Painting that, through precise naturalism, the use of shade, perspective, or all of these, creates the illusion of being that which is depicted. Most often applied to small details, such as drops of dew on flower petals.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
“A brief account of or a story about an individual or an incident. The anecdotal digression is a common feature of narrative in prose and verse. In the history of English literature and of literary characters the anecdote has a specific importance. In his Dictionary Samuel Johnson defined the term as “something yet unpublished; secret history”. During the 18th century and interest in “secret” histories increased steadily, and no doubt there is some connection between this and the growing popularity of –ana, table-talk and biography (qq.v) at that time. During the second half of the 18th century there was almost a craze for “secret” histories. In the last thirty years of it over a hundred books of anecdotage were published in England. Isaac Disraeli, father of Benjamin, became one of the best known and most assiduous gleaners of anecdotes. In 1791 he published three volumes titled Curiosities of Literature, consisting of Anecdotes, Characters, Sketches, and Observations, Literary, Historical, and Critical. These he followed with other collections: Calamities of Authors (1812-1813) in two volumes, and Quarrels of Authors (1814) in three volumes. In 1812 John Nichols published the first of nine volumes in a series titled Literary Anecdotes of the 18th Century. Such works remained popular during the Victorian period. Nor is the appetite for collections of anecdotes assuaged. In 1975 there was The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes.”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
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