Tag Archives: diction/grammar/style/usage

The Weekly Text, July 3, 2020: A Lesson Plan on the Crime and Puzzlement Case “Bomb Sight”

This week’s Text is a lesson plan on the Crime and Puzzlement case “Bomb Sight.” I open this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the proverb “pride goeth before a fall.” You’ll need this scan of the illustration and questions that drive the case to conduct your investigation. Finally, here is the typescript of the answer key so that you and your students can solve the case and arrest the suspected felon and bring him or her to the bar of justice.

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.

Doonesbury

If you have any budding comic strip drafters, graphic novelists, or just kids who like to draw in your cohort (I’ve had quite a few over the years), then this reading on the comic strip Doonesbury and its vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet might be of interest to them. In my experience, this reading has been high-interest material for a certain kind of student, especially once they’ve seen the strip itself–available in most daily newspapers and, of course, online. If you had told me that more than forty years after I was introduced to this strip in high school it would still be going strong in 2020, I don’t know if I would have believed it.

So, if nothing else, the topical nature of Doonesbury and its longevity, inextricably intertwined as they are, is an area for some critical inquiry.

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.

Term of Art: Agreement

“Agreement: The correspondence of a verb with its subject in person and number (Karen goes to Cal Tech; her sisters go to UCLA), and of a pronoun with its antecedent in person, number and gender (As soon as Karen finished the exam, she picked up her bookbag and left the room).”

Excerpted from: Strunk, William Jr., and E.B. White. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition. New York: Longman, 2000.

Word Root Exercise: Purg

Moving right along on this rainy morning in Vermont, here is a worksheet on the Latin word root purg. It means clean, and is a very productive root in English and the Romance languages. However, as you will see, you and your students, where words that grow around this root are concerned, will need to think broadly and figuratively about the definition of clean.

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.

Common Errors in English Usage: Continual, Continuous

Here’s an English usage worksheet on differentiating the use of the adjectives continual and continuous. The distinction is narrow, but worth observing.

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.

Term of Art: Adverbial Phrase

“Adverbial Phrase: A phrase that functions as an adverb. Landon laughs with abandon.”

Excerpted from: Strunk, William Jr., and E.B. White. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition. New York: Longman, 2000.

Parse (vi/vt)

It was Merriam-Webster’s word of the day yesterday, so here is a context clues worksheet on the verb parse, which is used both intransively and transitively. Given the number of parsing sentences worksheets I’ve drafted over the years, I still can’t figure out how I never created an instrument for introducing the verb parse to students. 

Anyway, here is is now; better late than never.

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.

Neurosis

None of us know, I guess, what’s going to happen with schools opening in the fall. Even with the best case scenario, opening schools is a dicey proposition. In any case, health teachers or just about anyone in a classroom come September, you may find this reading on neurosis and its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet useful for helping your students understand their feelings.

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.

Term of Art: Adverb

“Adverb: A word that modifies or otherwise qualifies a verb, an adjective, or another adverb. Gestures gracefully; exceptionally quiet engine.”

Excerpted from: Strunk, William Jr., and E.B. White. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition. New York: Longman, 2000.

Perceive (vt), Perception (n), Perceptive (adj)

Here are three context clues worksheets on the verb perceive, the noun perception, and the adjective perceptive. Because there are three parts of speech represented here, I try to use these in the classroom as chronologically close to each other as possible. Also, nota bene please that the verb perceive is only used transitively.

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.