Tag Archives: diction/grammar/style/usage

Three Documents to Support Written Analyses of Like Water for Chocolate

Continuing with a mishmash of documents I developed to support students, here are, again from the senior English Language Arts class I co-taught with Jason Zanitsch, some documents to support student work for a reading of Laura Esquivel’s novel Like Water for Chocolate. Jason’s goals for this unit were twofold and well focused: to introduce students to the genre of magical realism, and to use the story to induce students to write in a lively way about food–with a goal, of course, to arouse their thinking about lively descriptive writing in general. Over the years, I enjoyed watching Jason elicit some excellent prose from students using this unit.

So, here is a graphic organizer to track chapters, a brainstorming worksheet (consisting of ten modified cloze exercises) for using lively words to describe food with a lexicon of food-related words attached. Finally, here is the lexicon of lively words to describe food as a freestanding document.

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.

Cultural Literacy: Dog Eat Dog

Moving on through my differentiated and supported materials folder, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the idiom dog eat dog. I suspect you can find this document, in a simpler version, elsewhere on this blog. I developed this version of this worksheet to accompany a reading of the Langston Hughes poem “Let America Be America Again” which puts this idiom to work.

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.

A Learning Support on the Concept of Solipsism

Here is a learning support on the concept of solipsism that I worked up for a student in the excellent Senior English Language Arts class I’ve co-taught with Jason Zanitsch during these final years of my teaching career. There are more differentiated materials and learning supports from this course forthcoming.

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.

Three Learning Supports Adapted from the High School Edition of They Say, I Say

As I continue to clean out differentiated material folders, I found three learning supports I whipped up from the high school edition of Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s They Say/I Say, The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing (New York: Norton, 2018). Ergo, here are a glossary of expository terms, a list of commonly used transition words, and a list of argumentation templates divided into two parts (for ease of use, and depending on the students using these, you might want to divide them into even smaller parts), argumentation templates I and argumentation templates II.

I hope this material is useful to you, but if you need something like this, I imagine you found different versions of these document that I posted several years ago.

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.

Sample Annotations for The Declaration of Independence

Since we’re on a bit of a theme this morning, here is another document, this one a set of sample annotations for The Declaration of Independence, from the 11th-grade English class I co-taught over the past two years. This requires, I think, no explanation; so, I’ll spare you the bloviating.

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.

 

Sample Annotations for a Reading of Horatio Alger’s Short Story “Henry Trafton’s Independence”

Moving right along with differentiated material I developed for the 11th-grade English class I co-taught over the past two years, here is a sample annotations for “Henry Trafton’s Independence,” a short story by Horatio Alger. My father, who taught Alger at the University of Wisconsin, taught me, alas, to ridicule Alger’s contrived and even precious rags-to-riches stories. Nonetheless, this story showed up in this English class.

Incidentally, in researching this post, I learned that Horatio Alger, in his role as a Unitarian clergyman in Brewster, Massachusetts was found to have engaged in “the abominable and revolting crime of gross familiarity with boys.” I think, in this post-Catholic-clergy-scandal era, you know what that means. My father had a great deal to say about Richard “Dick” Hunter, the protagonist of Alger’s “Ragged Dick” stories. Dick’s name, my father told me, suggested a great deal about Horatio Alger himself.

I myself am agnostic on all of this.

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.

 

Three Documents for a Study of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible

I am very quickly headed to retirement. Do you know I’m relieved? As I remove myself and my possessions from my final school, I realized I have some odds and ends in my folder that I developed for classes I co-taught over the past couple of years.

For the past couple of years, in the autumn, the teacher for the Junior English Language Arts class I co-taught started the year with a unit on Arthur Miller’s play on the Salem Witch Trials, The Crucible. So, here are a list of questions to drive discussion of the play as well as to arouse ideas for writing essays; this list of sentence stems similarly aims to get students thinking about the play as well as how to write about it. Finally, since The Crucible is an allegory on the McCarthy Era, here is a list of analytical questions to accompany an article on the Red Scare.

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 Errors in English Usage: Meantime/Meanwhile

Here is a worksheet on the use of meantime and meanwhile. As Paul Brians, the author of Common Errors in English Usage (to which he generously allows access at no charge at his Washington State University web page), from which this worksheet is adapted, observes, most people use these words interchangeably. Merriam-Webster appears to think so, identifying them as synonyms to each other in the electronic version of its Collegiate Encyclopedia (11th Edition). At the same time, Merriam-Webster designates both words, when separated by dashes (i.e. mean-time and mean-while) as nouns.

Yet, as Professor Brians also points out, some usage experts designated specific uses for each of these adverbs and nouns. It is that designation that drives this worksheet, which is a full page and features a reading of two longish sentences and five modified cloze exercises. This might be a useful exercise for opening a discussion about, well, English usage; that in turn might lead to a review of a usage manual to familiarize students with the, well, usefulness, of such a book.

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.

Disclaimer

“Disclaimer (noun): A specific denial or disavowal, especially an explicit public statement of nonresponsibility or nonaffiliation; protective explanation; waiver. Adjective: disclamatory; verb: disclaim.

‘She turns on “Heated Topics,” a feminist talk show so controversial that it begins with viewer-discretion warning and ends with a disclaimer.’ Mary Cantwell, The New York Times”

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

Cultural Literacy: Irregular Verb

As below with the counterpart to this document, a Cultural Literacy worksheet on regular verbs, I am confident that this document appears elsewhere on this blog. Nonetheless, I think it’s not a bad idea to have this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the irregular verb adjacent to a run of 17 lessons on writing sentences.

This is a half-page worksheet with a two-sentence reading and three comprehension questions.

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.