Tag Archives: diction/grammar/style/usage

Common English Verbs Followed by an Object and an Infinitive: Forbid

Here is a worksheet on the verb forbid when used with an object and an infinitive.

The teacher forbid the students to smoke in class.

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.

Cultural Literacy: Idiom

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of the idiom. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of three sentences and three comprehension questions. As I have come to expect from the editors of The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, this is at once a short, cogent, and thorough explanation of the concept of the idiom and its uses.

Parenthetically, I have served many learners of English as a new language (though I have no academic credentials to do so) over the years. Idioms always caused these students a lot of problems because, as the reading for this worksheet observes, an idiom “…does not seem to make sense.” Because idioms, in their way, are excellent specimens of abstraction in language, they require interpretation. I’ve often wondered why they aren’t taught explicitly as such. Such a strategy, it seems to me, would cover a lot of pedagogical and cognitive bases, and prepare students for the kind of advanced thinking we theoretically want them to do.

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.

The Weekly Text, 31 January 2025: A Lesson Plan on the Latin Word Roots Carn and Carni

This week’s Text, for the final Friday of the first month of 2025, is this lesson plan on the Latin word roots carn and carni. They mean, which you know if you’ve ever enjoyed a non-vegetarian bowl of chili con carne, “flesh” and “meat.” This is a vigorous root in English, growing such words (all included on the worksheet below) as carnageincarnate, reincarnation, and carnivore.

This lesson opens, should you be inclined to use it, with this context clues worksheet on the noun game. In this context, the word doesn’t define things you play at, but rather wild animals served as a meal–that is, game birds like pheasants, large mammals like deer (i.e. venison) and the like. This, I hope, points the way toward the meaning of these word roots.

Finally, this scaffolded worksheet is the principal work of this lesson. It includes all of the words listed above, as well as cognates from the Romance languages.

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.

Common English Verbs Followed by an Object and an Infinitive: Expect

Here is a worksheet on the verb expect when used with an object and an infinitive.

The student expected the professor to teach a cogent lesson on contract law.

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.

Cultural Literacy: Huguenots

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Huguenots. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of four sentences and three comprehension question.

And unless I miss my guess, most secondary educational institutions don’t take a deep enough dive into European history to spend too much time on the travails of French Protestants. I became interested in them when I learned that New Rochelle, New York, through which I  have traveled frequently by train, was founded by Huguenots. Not only that, but as I researched this post, I discovered that New Paltz, New York (which I have never visited but heard good things about), was also founded by Huguenots.

So I wrote this, I suppose, mostly useless worksheet.

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.

The Weekly Text, 24 January 2024: A Second Lesson Plan on Boxing Weight Divisions from The Order of Things

This week’s Text is this second lesson plan on boxing weight divisions along with its attendant list as reading with comprehension questions. The first lesson in this series is available in the Weekly Text for 13 December 2024. This lesson joins a growing assortment of materials on boxing on this blog, which experience has shown me is of high interest to certain students. Hence, I have tagged this as high interest material.

This lesson, as in all lessons carrying the title The Order of Things, were suggested by and therefore adapted from Barbara Ann Kipfer’s book of the same name, which I highly recommend.

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.

Common English Verbs Followed by an Object and an Infinitive: Encourage

Here is a worksheet on the verb encourage when used with an object and an infinitive.

The teacher encouraged the principal to learn the spelling of the noun matinee.

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.

Corollary

“Corollary (noun): An assertion or proposition that follows implicitly, with little or no proof, from a given statement; an immediate deduction or inference; natural consequence, parallel, or accompaniment. Adjective: corollary

‘If this book doesn’t make you angry, it wasn’t worth writing.’ As any logician can tell you, the corollary of the above quotation is not necessarily true, that is, if the book does make you angry, it does not necessarily follow that it was worth writing. Laurence Urdang, Verbatim

Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.

Cultural Literacy: Hit Below the Belt

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the idiom “hit below the belt.” This is a half-page worksheet with a two-sentence reading (the first of one is a mildly unwieldy compound which might require revision for some readers) and three comprehension questions.

As you know, this idiom denotes issues of fair play. It arrives in the vernacular from boxing, in which hitting below the belt is illegal. This worksheet might be useful with other materials on boxing available on this blog. Since boxing, in my experience, tends to be of high interest, especially to boys and young men, I have tagged this post as such.

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.

The Devil’s Dictionary: Applause

“Applause, n. The echo of a platitude.”

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.