Tag Archives: diction/grammar/style/usage

The Weekly Text, April 30, 2021: A Lesson Plan on the Relative Pronouns

Posted on April 30, 2021 | Leave a comment

This week’s Text is a lesson plan on the relative pronoun. I open this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on limericks; in the event that you extend the lesson into a second day, here is an Everyday Edit worksheet on Thurgood Marshall, the late civil rights jurist and Supreme Court Justice. (Incidentally, if your students respond favorably to that Everyday Edit–mine generally did–you will find that the good people at Education World give away a yearlong supply of them.) This scaffolded worksheet on relative pronouns is the principal work of this lesson. Finally, here is the teacher’s copy of the worksheet to ease delivering this lesson.

The relative pronouns in common use are who, whom, whose, what, which, that, and the –ever forms: whoever, whatever, whichever, and whomever, and they are what this lesson addresses. So, if you want your students to develop an understanding of using these words, I hope these documents abet that cause.

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.

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Cultural Literacy: Fall of Rome

Posted on April 29, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the fall of Rome. This is half-page worksheet that offers the barest of introductions to the topic. Still, it is a good general introduction or a memory-jogger if your students need one.

It might make more interesting–even compelling–reading if one adds the context of, say, news footage of events at the United States capitol on January 6, 2021.

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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Sober (adj), Sobriety (n)

Posted on April 28, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here are a pair of context clues worksheets on sober and sobriety, respectively an adjective and a noun.

In writing these, I sought to include both primary meanings of sober, i.e., where alcohol and intoxicants are concerned, “sparing in the use of food or drink,” “not addicted to intoxicating drink,” and “not drunk”; where an approach to life and its vagaries are concerned, “marked by sedate or gravely or earnestly thoughtful character or demeanor,” “marked by temperance, moderation, or seriousness,” and “showing no excessive or extreme qualities of fancy, emotion, or prejudice”

The noun sobriety simply means “the quality or state of being sober.” In the worksheet for this word, then, I also attempted to create prose that students could use to infer the above meanings of sober. As I prepared these for publication, I tried to remember why I wrote them, but couldn’t. So I don’t know if I intended to use them together in one sitting, or to use them discretely over a week’s time, and use sobriety to gauge understanding and retention of the previously used worksheet for sober.

In any case, they’re yours now if you want them, so you can use them as 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.

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A Learning Support on Five Kinds of Sentences

Posted on April 27, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a learning support on five kinds of sentences. I grabbed this from Sylvan Barnet and Marcia Stubbs’ Barnet and Stubbs Practical Guide to Writing with Readings, Seventh Edition (New York: Harper Collins, 1995). I used an earlier edition of this book for the very first college course I took in the spring of 1990. When I mentioned my admiration for the utility and ease of use of the book, a friend of mine thoughtfully made me a gift of the edition cited above.

Anyway, this learning support doesn’t deal with the four kinds of sentences, i.e. declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory, for which I am currently preparing learning supports which will appear here in the near future. This document deals with syntactical structures, to wit, the simple, compound, complex, and complex-compound sentences, as well as the sentence fragment. It’s one page, so it’s simple but (I hope) helpful because of that simplicity.

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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Influenza Vaccine

Posted on April 26, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a reading on the influenza vaccination along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.

Over the years, I have heard various public figures opine on the need for a return to a solid civics curriculum in public schools in the United States. In fact, two United States Senators recently introduced legislation, called the Educating for Democracy Act, that would invest $1 billion the development of civics education in our country. In general and particularly in the light how closely our country has veered toward fascism in the past several years, I must concede the point. Apropo of civics education, I submit that learning about the science of vaccines, and vaccine efficacy, is at the moment an integral element of civics education–not to mention part of a general education.

So here you are. There are other materials on this site about vaccine–just search vaccine or vaccination.

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.

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The Weekly Text, April 23, 2021: A Lesson Plan on the Latin Word Root Mill-, Milli-

Posted on April 23, 2021 | Leave a comment

This week’s Text is a lesson plan on the lesson plan on the Latin word root, which mean, respectively, thousand and thousandth. I open this lesson with this worksheet on the noun century.  Here is the scaffolded worksheet that is the primary work of this lesson.

As you can see, these are very productive roots in English, yielding words like millennium and millipede. As I look at this lesson plan, I see that I intended to write two separate worksheets for these two roots. There are two separate listings for these roots,  but I don’t find, in the dictionary that informs this work, a separate word list for milli. In any case, these documents are, as the bulk of the material posted here, in Microsoft Word. So, it you wanted to add millimeter to the list of words to analyze and define, you can.

In any case, depending on the students you serve, there is plenty of room in this lesson for a freewheeling discussion on mill and milli, whether it is important to know both, and why.

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.

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Write It Right: Involve for Entail

Posted on April 22, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Involve for Entail. ‘Proof of the charges will involve his dismissal.’ Not at all; it will entail it. To involve is, literally, to infold, not to bring about, nor cause to ensue. An unofficial investigation, for example, may involve character and reputation, but the ultimate consequence is entailed. A question, in the parliamentary sense, may involve a principal; its settlement one way or another may entail expense, or injury to interests. An act may involve one’s honor and entail disgrace.”

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.

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Common Errors in English Usage: Pheasant (n), Peasant (n)

Posted on April 22, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is an English usage worksheet on the nouns pheasant and peasant. I’m not sure if the former word is essential to the high school lexicon, but the latter certainly is. Any study of history will necessitate the use of the word peasant.

But these worksheets–there will eventually be a hundred or more of them on Mark’s Text Terminal–is primarily usage, not vocabulary building, though I think vocabulary building could be a corollary benefit. I wrote these to meet the Common Core standard (L.11-12.1b), to wit, “Resolve issues of complex or contested usage, consulting references, (e.g., Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, Garner’s Modern American Usage) as needed.” I hope they are useful in that way.

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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A Concluding Assessment Lesson on Adverbs

Posted on April 21, 2021 | Leave a comment

If you search “lesson plan on adverbs” on this blog, you will find that there are a total of seven lesson plans dealing with this part of speech; here is the concluding assessment for the unit those seven lessons comprise.

I open this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the proverb “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” Because this lesson all but inevitably runs into a second day, here is another Cultural Literacy worksheet, this one on the idiom “six of one, a half dozen of the other.” Finally, here is the structured worksheet, which closely follows the sequence of the aforementioned seven lessons, that is the primary work of this lesson and the concluding assessment of this seven-lesson unit.

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.

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William Randolph Hearst

Posted on April 20, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a reading on William Randolph Hearst along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.

If you have Netflix, the service’s recently released film Mank deals with William Randolph Hearst (played in the film with blithe and subtle villainy by the great Charles Dance), inasmuch as the subject of the film, the legendary screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (whose friends called him “Mank” at his insistence, hence the film’s title), wrote Citizen Kane about Hearst. The film delves into one of the most hotly contested issues in film history: Who wrote Citizen Kane? Or, if Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz co-wrote it, whose voice, political sensibilities, and artistic vision predominates? A great deal of ink has been spilled over this issue, including the storied book-length essay Raising Kane by the late, eminent film critic Pauline Kael, which appeared in two consecutive issues of The New Yorker early in 1971.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that this is relatively timely material, especially if you have a precocious cinephile (I knew quite a few back in the day) on your hands.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful to your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

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