“He is a shallow, affected, self-conscious fribble–so there.”
Vita Sackville-West, letter to Harold Nicolson, 1959
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
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities, readings/research
A couple of days ago I posted a context clues worksheet on the adjective abstract. For high school students, especially the college bound, this is a key concept and word.
To take it further, here is a lesson plan on concrete and abstract nouns.
To begin this lesson, you might want to use (that is, if you don’t incorporate the aforementioned context clues worksheet on abstract, which I should probably do myself), you might find this Everyday Edit worksheet on The Empire State useful. This scaffolded worksheet on using concrete and abstract nouns is the mainstay of the lesson; this teacher’s copy of the worksheet will make the lesson a bit easier to deliver.
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.
“Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged united states history
“In attempting to depict the boredom of human existence, he has run the very grave risk of thoroughly boring his reader.”
San Francisco Chronicle
“The suggestion that something larger is being said about the human predicament…won’t hold water, any more than Beckett’s incontinent heroes can.”
The Spectator
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
“Religious tolerance, mutual respect between vocational groups, belief in the rights of the individual, are among the virtues that the best of our high schools now foster.”
James Bryant Conant (1893-1978) as quoted in The Teacher and the Taught (1963)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“I can assure the American public that the errors in Johnson’s Dictionary are ten times as numerous as they suppose; and that the confidence now reposed in its accuracy is the greatest injury to philology that now exists.”
Noah Webster, letter, 1807
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
“His characters are as shallow as the saucers in which they stack their daily emotions, and instead of interpreting his material–or even challenging it–he has been content merely to make a carbon copy of a not particularly significant surface life of Paris.”
The Dial
“…leaves one with the feeling that the people it describes really do not matter; one is left at the end with nothing to digest,”
The New York Times
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
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities, readings/research
“In a hundred years the histories of French literature will only mention (this work) as a curio.”
Emile Zola, in Emile Zola 1953
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
“The same road that has been traveled with Kerouac and to an extent Herbert Gold, this was for those schooled in the waste matter of the body and the mind; for others, a real recoil.”
Kirkus Reviews
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
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities, readings/research
“Heller wallows in his own laughter and finally drowns in it. What remains is a debris of sour jokes, stage anger, dirty words, synthetic looniness, and the sort of antic behavior the children fall into when they know they are losing our attention.”
Whitney Balliet, The New Yorker
“There is a great difference, after all, between milking a joke (the great gift of all comedians) and stretching it out till you kill it. Mr. Heller has enough verve not to have to try so hard to be funny.”
William Barrett, Atlantic Monthly
“…it gasps for want of craft and sensibility…. The book is an emotional hodgepodge; no mood is sustained long enough to register for more than a chapter.”
New York Times Book Review
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
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities, readings/research
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