“Clever for Obliging. In this sense the word was once in general use in the United States, but is now seldom heard and life here is less insupportable.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
Here is a worksheet on the Latin word roots extra and extro. They mean outside and beyond. This two roots are at the base of a lot of high-frequency words in English, including two adjectives commonly used in your own school–extracurricular and extramural.
Or how about the strong expository verb extrapolate? Surely something we want students to be able to do. Then of course there is always the old standby, extraordinary, literally “beyond ordinary.” Enough said.
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 Great Gatsby. This is a half-page worksheet with a two-sentence reading and three comprehension questions. In other words, the sparest of introduction what many people regard as the Great American Novel.
If you’re looking for something a bit longer on Gatsby, you’ll find it here. Likewise, if you need a reading on F. Scott Fitzgerald himself, you’ll find one here.
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.
It’s the Word of the Day at Merriam-Webster today, so here is context clues worksheet on the adjective desultory. It means, for the purposes of making meaning on this document, and in the vernacular as well, “marked by lack of definite plan, regularity, or purpose.”
However, it can also mean “not connected with the main subject” and “disappointing in progress, performance, or quality.” This is not a high-frequency word in English, and in any case, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen or heard it used to mean “not connected to the main subject.” On the other hand, “disappointing in progress, performance, or quality” is a close enough corollary to “marked by lack of definite plan, regularity, or purpose that one might say the first definition is the outcome of the second in this sentence.
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 reading on Erasmus along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.
I don’t know if anyone teaches Erasmus of Rotterdam, as he was and is known, at the secondary level. He is by any measure an exemplary Northern Renaissance humanist. Now that I have this set of documents, I might add it to my list of biographical research assignments for global studies–provided that I ever use those materials again. Whatever the case in your classroom, this document is–as is virtually everything on Mark’s Text Terminal–formatted in Microsoft Word. In other words, these are open-source documents for you to do with what you will.
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 worksheet on differentiating the use of genius and brilliant. This document, like all documents under the title above, are informed by Paul Brian’s book Common Errors in English Usage, to which he allows full access at no charge at the Washington State University website.
The simple usage point of this worksheet consists in this: genius is a noun, and brilliant is an adjective. In other words, you can say “He is a genius” (using genius as a predicate noun), but you cannot say “He does genius work,” because genius is not an adjective and cannot modify the noun work. You can also say something like “I think Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin is a work of genius.”
You can, however, say both “He is brilliant” (using brilliant as a predicate adjective), and you can say “He does brilliant work,” (using brilliant as an attributive adjective). You cannot say “He is a brilliant.” It doesn’t sound right in any case, though, does it? Brilliant, as above, is an adjective and should be used as one.
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 Grapes of Wrath. This is a half-page worksheet with a three-sentence reading and three comprehension questions. In other words, a concise introduction to the novel’s basic plot, with an excursus on the origins of its title.
If you’re looking for something longer on this book, you’ll find it here. If you want something on John Steinbeck himself, here that is as well.
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 worksheet on the Greek roots arc , archi, archeo, and archae/o. They mean rule, chief, first, and ancient. You can probably see archaeology (i.e. the study of ancient things) growing from the final of the four, but the others are a bit more obscure. There is an element of polysemy in these roots, which may make this worksheet, or at least finding the pattern of meaning in the words on it, a bit more difficult for students.
Still, when you think of words like archenemy, included in this document, archbishop, or archdiocese, suddenly chief and first come into sharper focus. Likewise monarch, archetype and hierarchy, also both present in this worksheet, reinforce those meanings. As far as rule is concerned, many of the political and social positions described by words growing from this root do indeed rule, as well as promulgate rules.
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.
“Citizen for Civilian. A soldier may be a citizen, but is not a civilian.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
Though it’s usefulness in the high school classroom may be dubious, here, nonetheless, is a context clues worksheet on the adjective stentorian. It means, simply, “extremely loud.” Unless this word is useful in, say, a forensics team lesson or anything else related to formal debate, I don’t know where or why to teach it. It’s not exactly a high-frequency word in English. I assume I wrote this because at some point it was the Word of the Day at Merriam-Webster.
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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