“Homophone: (Greek ‘same sound’): A word which is pronounced the same as another but has a different spelling and meaning, e.g.: foul/fowl; wood/would; pearl/purl.”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
Here is a worksheet on the use of the conjunctions if and whether in both casual speech and formal prose. The distinction, as Professor Paul Brians points out (this and all other materials under the heading above are based on his book Common Errors in English Usage, to which he allows access at no charge at the Washington State University website) is stylistic. Anyway, this is a full-page worksheet with ten sentences for analysis.
But, like practically everything on this blog, this document is formatted in Microsoft Word. You can do what you want with it–it is, as I believe the term of art has it, open source.
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.
“Figurative (adjective): Characterized by or using figures of speech, and hence having meaning beyond the explicit or literal; rhetorical or metaphorical; imaginative or ornate in language; elaborately expressed. Adverb: figuratively; noun: figurativeness.
‘The metonymy red tape for the routine of bureaucracy, synecdoche mercury for thermometer, the antithesis Man proposes and God disposes, the famous Dickens syllepsis (used preferably for humor only) Miss Bolo went home in a flood of tears and a sedan chair…, the allusion He is the Croesus of the community, the analogy Chemical elements are to compounds as letters are to words, and the editor’s innuendo Flames, James, written to an assistant named James, on the margin of a contribution with the request that it be printed entire or consigned to the flames—all are illustrative of the possibilities of figurative language in the cause of economy.’ John B. Opdyke, Say What You Mean”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
Here is a context clues worksheet on the noun age. These sentences provide clues to the meaning of this noun as “a period of time dominated by a central figure or prominent feature.” This use of age is similar to the nouns era (“a period identified by some prominent figure or characteristic feature”) and epoch (“an extended period of time usually characterized by a distinctive development or by a memorable series of events”).
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.
On this April Fool’s Day, this week’s Text is a lesson plan on the Crime and Puzzlement case “Spelling Bee.”
I open this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the rhetorical question (it’s a reading of one compound sentence that nonetheless yields three comprehension questions). You’ll need this PDF of the illustration of the crime scene with its attendant investigatory questions. Finally, you’ll want this typescript of the answer key to arrest the offender and bring him or her to the bar of justice.
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.
For the final Friday of Women’s History Month 2022, here is a reading on Julia Child along with its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. Whatever one thinks of French cooking, which Ms. Child brought to American cuisine, she was by any measure an accomplished woman.
I confess ignorance where both French cooking and Ms. Child are concerned–my own palate, alas, is undeniably plebeian. In researching this post, I learned that she stood six feet, two inches tall; her height disqualified her from World War II service in the Women’s Army Corps (WACs) or the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Services). She joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to today’s Central Intelligence Agency, where she worked directly with OSS founder General William J. (“Wild Bill”) Donovan. According to Ms. Child’s Wikipedia page, in her service to the OSS, she took on the task of solving the problem of curious sharks setting off underwater explosives placed by the OSS. She experimented with recipes that would serve as shark repellent; her method is still in use today.
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.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Victorian Period. The era is named, of course, for Queen Victoria and her outsized influence on British mores during her reign. This full-page worksheet leads with a four-sentence reading which includes two long compounds, and six comprehension questions. In other words, a decent summary of an important social, economic, diplomatic, and political period in Great Britain,
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.
For the third week of Women’s History Month 2022, here is a reading on Queen Elizabeth I with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. Her reign was long–44 years. Queen Elizabeth II currently reigning, has held her throne for 70 years and 33 days as of this writing.
Elizabeth I was a powerful monarch, and the achievements of her age earned her the honorific of her era’s name, the Elizabethan Age. Like Elizabeth II, who had dealt with her share of family dysfunction: she was the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn; after Henry executed Anne (and I didn’t know this until I prepared the material above), Elizabeth I was declared “retroactively illegitimate.”
In my experience, and speaking generally, the salacious details of upper class idiocy, shame, and hypocrisy tends to interest secondary school students. After all, as the great Los Angeles punk band X (featuring Exene Cervenka) so elegantly put it, that’s “Sex and Dying in High Society.”
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.
“Nawal El Saadawi: (1931-2021) Egyptian writer. The foremost woman writer of Egypt and the Middle East, el Saadawi has published nearly thirty books of fiction and sociology. She is also an influential activist for woman’s rights and a medical doctor. About half of her work has been translated from Arabic into English, including several novels. Woman at Point Zero (1983) is about a young village girl forced into prostitution and condemned to die for murder. The novel, which has been translated into twenty-two languages, chronicles the sexual exploitation of women in Egypt and examine the narrow range of options available to women in a conformist society. Other novels include God Dies by the Nile (1987), The Fall of the Imam (1988), and The Innocence of the Devil (1992). El Saadawi’s fiction draws on indigenous Arabic narratives, and thus her prose often seems highly stylized and poetic. Death of an Ex-Minister and Other Stories (tr 1987) reveals her experiments with diction, with the various narrative voices usually speaking in a monologue. The Hidden Face of Eve (1980), a sociological work, was the first book to document the horrors of clitoridectomy in northeastern Africa. El Saadawi has also written a travel account and political tracts devoted to women’s causes.
As Health Minister under the Anwar Sadat regime, el Saadawi was imprisoned for her outspoken opposition to that government’s social policies, which produced Memoirs from a Women’s Prison (tr 1986). In 1982 she formed the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association (AWSA), and international women’s organization which has a consultative status with the United Nations and combats state repression and censorship, The Cairo chapter of AWSA was forcibly closed in 1991, though it continues to operate without headquarters.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Diana, who is the Roman version of Artemis, the goddess of the hunt and the moon. This is a half-page worksheet with a one-sentence reading and two comprehension questions. In other words, just the basics.
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.
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