“Distinctly for Distinctively. ‘The custom is distinctly Oriental.’ Distinctly is plainly; distinctively, in a way to distinguish one thing from others.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
Once again, from Paul Brians’ book Common Errors in English Usage (Sherwood, Oregon: William James 2013), here is a worksheet on the use of the expression not my forte. This is a mostly unstructured worksheet that calls upon students to write sentences extemporaneously from subject to period using the expression not my forte. Since this is an expression educated people use quite commonly, I think high school students ought to learn it.
Incidentally, Professor Brians allows free access to this book on his web page at Washington State University.
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 Cultural Literacy worksheet on the original thirteen colonies of what would become the United States. This is a half-page worksheet with a one–longish, with the first clause separated by a colon from the list of the thirteen colonies–sentence reading and two 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.
This week’s Text is this lesson plan on the Greek word root chron/o. It means, of course, time. This is a very productive root in English, and its offshoots include such high-frequency English words as chronicle, chronology, synchronize, chronic, and, for those of us involved in online learning, asynchronous. I open this lesson with this context clues worksheet on the noun interval in the hope that it will point the way to the meaning of this Greek root; in any case, interval is a word I think students ought to know before graduating high school.
Finally, here is the scaffolded worksheet that is the principal work of this lesson.
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 half-page context clues worksheet on the adjective bespoke. For some reason, this adjective, which means custom-made, found its way into everyday discourse a few years ago, about the same time curate did, I think. I whipped up this context clues sheet and then, of course, never used it. Maybe someone can find something to do with it. It certainly doesn’t strike me as a word students in secondary school–provided they’re not planning to go to work on Savile Row or its equivalent–need to know.
Honestly, some of the uses of this word I encountered made me cringe.
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.
“Editorialize (verb): To express one’s opinion or point of view; introduce opinion or bias into reporting of facts or information; admix comment with reportage; characterize or label, Noun: editorializer, editorialization.
‘Girls, Shmul editorialized in his little book, live a stone age life in a blown-glass cave.’ Grace Paley, The Little Disturbances of Man”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
Given that most wage-earners have seen it shrink consistently over the past 18 or so months (not to mention over the past two or three generations), now strikes me as a propitious time to publish this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the term take-home pay and the concept it represents. This is a half-page worksheet with a one-sentence reading and two comprehension questions. This document, obviously, could be dilated to move an inquiry on the effect of inflation on take-home pay, something we’re all dealing with (unless your income is derived from invested capital, and even then you might be taking a haircut) right now.
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.
In my final couple years of co-teaching high school English Language Arts class, I was disappointed that students rarely read entire books (although I had the good fortune to work with two English teachers who did assign entire books), and therefore seldom performed any substantial interpretive work on what they did read–which was and is, I expect, short passages from novels. Students annotate these texts, but don’t really write anything insightful about them. Still, given how little students read these days, they struggled with adding interpretive notes–i.e. annotating–even these short texts.
So I developed this learning support on annotating for analogy, allusion, metaphor and tone, and this one on rhetorical analysis for ethos, pathos, and logos.
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.
From the pages of Paul Brians’ book Common Errors in English Usage (Sherwood, Oregon: William James 2013, to which he allows unfettered access at no charge at his Washington State University web page, here is a worksheet worksheet on the adverb nevertheless and the adverb and preposition notwithstanding. This document stresses that these word are always spelled as one, not, therefore, as never the less or not withstanding.
My own contribution to this material involves defining these words–which mean basically the same thing–and stressing their use as transition words in prose. This is an unstructured worksheet; in other words, there are no cloze exercises here. Students will write declarative sentences from subject to period using nevertheless and notwithstanding.
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.
Although I expect he is not much taught at the secondary level (where, nonetheless, I first encountered him), here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on T.S. Eliot. This is a full-page worksheet with a reading of four sentences and four comprehension questions. A short, symmetrical, and almost thorough introduction to this important, if controversial, twentieth-century poet.
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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