Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on irony. This is a half-page worksheet with a two-sentence reading and two comprehension questions–just the basics, in other words. This is useful word and concept in particular for reviewing books and movies.
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.
“Discursive (adjective): Covering a range of topics or discoursing freely and broadly, moving from subject to subject; characterized by rational analysis rather than intuition. Adverb: discursively; noun: discursiveness.
‘He published some of the best reporting—of an unofficial and personal kind—that was written about the war, and he elicited from Augustus John his delightful discursive memoirs, in which history is unimportant and chronology does not exist.’ Edmund Wilson, Classics and Commercials”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on euphemism, which I think might be useful in writing reviews, especially since reviews often use euphemisms so soften harsh judgments. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of two sentences (the first of which is a compound separated by a semicolon, and may be best shortened for emergent readers and users of English as a second language) and three comprehension questions.
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.
Bees: In his Philosophical Dictionary Voltaire points out that bees seem superior to humans because one of their secretions is useful. Nothing a human secretes is of use; quite the contrary. Whatever we produce makes us disagreeable to be around.
The bee’s social organization also invites comparisons. If the queen were to be removed and the drones were able to convince the worker bees to go on working while they stepped in as managers, what would happen to our supply of honey?
Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston. The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.
The second lesson plan of the Writing Reviews Unit is about argumentation, which any review will need to do well to convince its readers. In fact, when I first began working on these materials in 2006 or so, I conceived them as an introduction to the kind of academic writing kids really need to know how to do before they graduate high school.
So this scaffolded worksheet seeks to assist students in developing their own understanding of the difference between a quarrel and an argument in order to clarify the rhetorical and epistemological purpose of an argument. You might find the the teacher’s copy of the worksheet useful.
This lesson opens with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of to damn with faint praise, the use of which in a review I will take as a given.
Happy Fourth of July! I bid you a restful day and evening.
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.
“Depot for Station. ‘Railroad depot.’ A depot is a place of deposit; as, a depot of supply for an army.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on conciseness. This is a full-page worksheet, although it could certainly be made more, uh, concise by turning it into a half-page worksheet by removing a question or two–there are four, total. Especially because the reading is only two sentences.
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.
“Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: (April 19-May 16, 1943) Revolt by Polish Jews under Nazi occupation against deportation to Treblinka. By July 1942 the Nazis had herded 500,000 Jews from surrounding areas into the ghetto in Warsaw. Though starvation killed thousands each month, the Nazis began transferring over 5,000 Jews a week to rural ‘labor camps.’ When word reached the ghetto in early 1943 that the destination was actually the gas chambers at Treblinka, the underground Jewish combat group ZOB attacked the Nazis, killing 50 in four days of street fighting and causing the deportations to halt. On April 19, Heinrich Himmler sent 2,000 SS men and army troops to clear the ghetto of its remaining 56,000 Jews. For four weeks the Jewish ZOB and guerillas fought with pistols and homemade bombs, destroying tanks and killing several hundred Nazis, until their ammunition ran out. All the Jews were either killed or deported, and on May 16 the SS chief declared ‘The Warsaw Ghetto is no more.’”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on caricature. This is a half-page worksheet with a two-sentence reading and two comprehension questions. This is a word and concept that would be useful in certain kinds of reviews, either as a noun (a caricature of) or a transitive verb (The critic caricatured the intentions of the author).
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.
“self-correction: A student’s ability to detect and correct errors. The term is often used while students read aloud and hear themselves make errors but correct it. Some reading tests consider a self-correction to be an error, which can result in a misleading oral reading score.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
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