“As for That, or If. ‘I do not know as he is living.’ This error is not very common among those who can write at all, but sometimes one sees it in high place.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged diction/grammar/style/usage
Here is a somewhat-less-than-distinguished short worksheet on differentiating the use of that and which. As the worksheet’s text explains, these exercises are limited to the use of these two words as pronouns. If you look them up in the dictionary you’ll find usage advise on relative or restrictive clauses. I’m developing material on those areas of English usage, so stay tuned 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.
The other day, I set aside a group of Cultural Literacy worksheets that I think are timely, and arguably ought to be in front of students–or at least something like them that present important concepts that might inform thinking about the rights and responsibilities of citizenship in this difficult time.
Ergo, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of an epidemic. And that’s it.
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.
“Assonance: Sometimes called “vocalic rhyme,” it consists of the repetition of similar vowel sounds, usually close together, to achieve a similar effect of euphony. There is a kind of drowsy sonority in the following lines from Tennyson’s Lotos-Eaters which is assonantal:
‘The Lotos blooms below the barren peak:
The Lotos blooms by every winding creek:
All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone
Thro’ every hollow cave and alley lone,
Round and round the spicy downs the yellow Lotos-dust is blown.’
In Strange Meeting Wilfred Owen uses a vocalic or half rhyme to similar effect:
‘It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through grantires which titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.'”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged diction/grammar/style/usage, poetry, term of art
Here is a context clues worksheet on the verb matriculate, which is used both intransitively and transitively. This is the last of the Words of the Day from Merriam-Webster while I was away for the Labor Day weekend.
Teachers, especially high school teachers, as well as guidance counselors, will agree, I hope, that students ought to know this word as they proceed toward their graduation days. It’s probably worth mentioning, for linguistic purposes, that after students matriculate, work for four years, then graduate, their relationship with their college is characterized by the noun alma mater, i.e. “nourishing mother.” These words stem from the Latin word roots matr, matri, and mater, which mean “mother.”
In fact, I’ll link to this word root exercise on matr, matri, and mater in the event you want to take this inquiry a bit further.
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.
“Participial Phrase: A present or past participle with accompanying modifiers, objects, or complements. The buzzards, circling with sinister determination, squawked loudly.”
Excerpted from: Strunk, William Jr., and E.B. White. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition. New York: Longman, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Last but not least on this rainy Thursday afternoon, here is a context clues worksheet on the adjective colloquial. This is one of those words (like most of the context clues worksheets I’ve published here lately, this popped up as the Word of the Day at Merriam-Webster a few days back) that tempts me, because it shows up in educated discourse all over the place, to develop a series of worksheets for its family, to wit, colloquialism, colloquy, colloquium and colloquist–all of which have a solid Latin lineage.
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.
Years ago, when I worked in a school that had a cooperative career and technical education (CTE) program, I served students either in such a program or on their way to one. I developed this reading on x-rays and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet for students interested in becoming x-ray technicians.
Then I never used it. For one thing, it is highly technical with a lot of relatively advanced scientific vocabulary. As the years went by the CTE program slipped away, and any modifications I might have performed to make this material more readable while making it more comprehensive went with the program.
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.
This isn’t a political blog, but if you followed the news on the national convention (or the convention itself) of one of the major political parties in the United States last month, you’ll understand why I think it’s time to post this Cultural Literacy worksheet on nepotism.
Incidentally, I doubt that there are many teachers in this country who haven’t attended a professional development day in which the importance of critical thinking was discussed. As Daniel Willingham asked in an article for the American Federation of Teachers’ magazine American Educator, “Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach?” The answer is complicated, but a summary would go something like this: critical thinking is a complicated cognitive act involving, among other things, using a rich fund of prior knowledge and conceptual vocabulary to think synthetically in order to understand new and unexpected circumstances and things.
Nepotism, I’ll argue here, is one of those conceptually rich terms that gives students the cognitive tools to evaluate and navigate a variety of situations in educational institutions, workplaces, governments, and bureaucracies. It can also equip them to understand why–and yes, develop a critical understanding of why–institutions, businesses and governments develop inertia and dysfunction. In a time when our periodicals and television news channels carry daily news about toxic workplaces characterized by cliquish incompetence, nepotism is a word students should know so they can understand its conceptual meaning and use it as a tool for assessment of the dismal workplaces in which so many of us spend our lives.
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.
“Article. A good and useful word, but used without meaning by shopkeepers; as, ‘A good article of vinegar,’ for a good vinegar.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged diction/grammar/style/usage, humor, literary oddities
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