This cool, overcast, and rainy day in New York City seems like a perfect time to post this reading on rainbows and its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. It’s straightforward stuff, so I suppose there is really not much more to say about it.
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.
“Simile: (Latin neuter of similis ‘like’) A figure of speech in which one thing is likened to another, in such a way as to clarify and enhance an image. It is an explicit comparison (as opposed to the metaphor, q.v., where the comparison is implicit) recognizable by the use of the words ‘like’ or ‘as.’ It is equally common in prose and verse and is a figurative device of great antiquity. The following example comes from Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train:
‘The great blast furnaces of Liege rose along the line like ancient castles burning in a border raid.’
And this instance in verse from Ted Hughes’ poem February:
‘The wolf with its belly stitched full of big pebbles;
Nibelung wolves barbed like black pine forest
Across a red sky, over blue snow…’
See also EPIC SIMILE.”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
Here is a learning support on using pronouns with gerunds. This is a half-page reading from Paul Brians’ excellent book Common Errors in English Usage, which you’ll find available to you, at no cost, under that hyperlink.
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.
Here is a learning support on gerunds and infinitives that accompanies a raft of new material I’ll be posting in the next several months on mastering the use of gerunds and infinitives in English prose. This thing, as it should be, I suppose, is self-explanatory.
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.
Moving right along this morning, here is a worksheet on the Greek word root pyr-o . It means, as you already know, fire; but it also means heat and fever. This root yields the high-frequency English word pyromaniac, which does not appear on this document. Lower frequency words in use by educated people, however abound here: you’ll find empyrean, as well as pyre, and the solid scientific adjective pyrophoric.
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.
Here’s something new from Mark’s Text Terminal: a worksheet on using the verb acknowledge with a gerund. This material (these materials, rather, as I have over a hundred of these documents) arrives here after rolling around in my current work folder for about 15 years.
I started developing these during state testing in June one year, and chipped away at them each year as I waited around at work to take my turn proctoring tests. Their source is a small book I purchased on Amazon, Mastering Gerunds and Infinitives (Honolulu: Focus on English, 2008) by someone named Tom Celentano. On several occasions, I almost tossed this enterprise into the digital dumpster. But each time I opened the folder, I ended up working further with them. So, when I opened it last January, while quarantining for COVID (the second time), I opened the folder and finished these.
Anyway, for more on these, see their section in the About Posts and Texts page, where a fuller explanation of these, with supporting documents, is available.
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.
Once again, from Paul Brians’ book Common Errors in English Usage (to which he generously allows access at no cost at the Washington State University website, and which has now also become a podcast), here is a worksheet on differentiating the use of the adjectives impertinent and irrelevant in prose. This is a full-page document with a reading of two longish (both containing clauses separated by a semicolon) compound sentences and ten modified cloze exercises.
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.
“Palindrome: (Greek ‘running back again’): A word or sentence (occasionally a verse) which reads the same both ways. Common words are: civic, level, minim, radar, rotor. Famous examples of such phrase or sentences are: (a) ‘Madam, I’m Adam’, to which the reply was ‘Sir, I’m Iris; (b) ‘Able was I ere I saw Elba’ (attributed apocryphally to Napoleon who, alas, spoke no English); (c) ‘Sums are not set as a test on Erasmus’; (d) ‘A man, a plan, a canal—Panama!’; (e) “’In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni’, said by moths in flight; (f) ‘Straw? No, too stupid a fad; I put soot on warts!’; (g) ‘Deliver desserts’, demanded Nemesis, emended named, stressed, reviled; (h) T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. I’d assign it a name: ‘Gnat dirt upset on drab pot toilet’ (by W.H. Auden); (i) Stop Syrian! I start at rats in airy spots; (j) Sex at noon taxes; (j) SIROMORIS—this was the telegraphic address on the writing paper of Edward Elgar (1857-1934), who was knighted and appointed OM. There are numerical palindromes. A simple example is: add 132 to 321 for the total 363.
The best known collection of verses was that produced by one Ambrose Pamperis in 1802. It consists of 416 palindromic verses recounting the campaigns of Catherine the Great.”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
Let me begin this post, on this rainy Monday morning, with wishes of Eid Mubarak to my Muslim friends, neighbors, and students. Then let me offer you this context clues on the noun boom. I wrote this while serving in an economics- and finance-themed high school in the Financial District of Manhattan, so it goes without saying, mostly, that the clues in the five sentences in this worksheet point students toward inferring a definition of “a rapid expansion or increase,” “a rapid widespread expansion of economic activity,” and “an upsurge in activity, interest, or popularity.”
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.
“Vernacular: (Latin vernaculus “domestic, native, indigenous’) Domestic or native language. Now applied to the language used in one’s native country. It may also be used to distinguish between a ‘literary’ language and a dialect; for instance, William Barnes’s ‘vernacular poems,’ and outstanding example of dialect (q.v.) poetry.”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
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