Tag Archives: diction/grammar/style/usage

Cultural Literacy: Montage

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on montage in cinematic form. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of three sentences and three comprehension questions. The sentences are longish, but sufficiently straightforward that I don’t think they need any modification. However, as I looked at this document this morning, I couldn’t help but think it might be better presented as a full-page document with a few prior knowledge questions on the order of “Can you think of a movie you’ve watched that used montage to advance the story?”

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, 18 July 2025: Lesson Four of a Unit on Writing Reviews

This week’s Text, as headlined above, is the fourth lesson plan of seven lessons and planning materials, for a total of eight consecutive Weekly Texts. This is a lesson on aesthetics and establishing aesthetic criteria for preparing reviews. So, unsurprisingly, the do-now exercise for this lesson is this Cultural worksheet on aesthetics. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of two sentences (the second one of which is a longish compound that might best be turned into two sentences for emerging readings and users of English as a second language) and three comprehension questions. It is a short but effective introduction to the concept of aesthetics.

This reading as worksheet is basically a summary of the procedures outlined in the lesson plan. This graphic organizer blank in landscape layout helps students organize their aesthetic criteria for reviews; you might find the teacher’s copy of same useful. Finally, here are six glossaries of aesthetic terms for movies, music, video games, books, graphic novels, and television shows.

And that’s it for another week. I hope you’re enjoying the summer.

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: Lowbrow

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of the lowbrow in culture. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of one sentence (longish, separated by a colon, but easily readable) and two comprehension questions. It’s easy to see the usefulness of this word in the context of a cultural review.

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: Kitsch

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on kitsch. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of two sentences and two questions and nicely introduces this concept. It’s not hard to see how the words kitsch or kitschy would find their way into a review–especially of, say, a visual arts exhibition.

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, 11 July 2025: Lesson Three of a Unit on Writing Reviews

OK, moving right along, here is the third lesson plan of the Writing Reviews Unit, this one on gathering and judiciously using evidence in a piece of argumentative writing. The do-now exercise for this lesson is this Cultural Literacy worksheet on genre: This is a full-page worksheet with a reading of four simple sentences four questions. Finally, this structured note-taking and outlining worksheet is the primary work of this lesson.

The worksheet is longish by design, and can, as can all the documents in this post, can be easily edited. Like just about everything on this blog, these documents are formatted in Microsoft Word, so fully manipulable.

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: Irony

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on irony. This is a half-page worksheet with a two-sentence reading and two comprehension questions–just the basics, in other words. This is useful word and concept in particular for reviewing books and movies.

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.

Discursive

“Discursive (adjective): Covering a range of topics or discoursing freely and broadly, moving from subject to subject; characterized by rational analysis rather than intuition. Adverb: discursively; noun: discursiveness.

‘He published some of the best reporting—of an unofficial and personal kind—that was written about the war, and he elicited from Augustus John his delightful discursive memoirs, in which history is unimportant and chronology does not exist.’ Edmund Wilson, Classics and Commercials”

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

Cultural Literacy: Euphemism

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on euphemism, which I think might be useful in writing reviews, especially since reviews often use euphemisms so soften harsh judgments. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of two sentences (the first of which is a compound separated by a semicolon, and may be best shortened for emergent readers and users of English as a second language) 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.

The Weekly Text, 4 July 2025: Lesson Two of the Writing Reviews Unit

The second lesson plan of the Writing Reviews Unit is about argumentation, which any review will need to do well to convince its readers. In fact, when I first began working on these materials in 2006 or so, I conceived them as an introduction to the kind of academic writing kids really need to know how to do before they graduate high school.

So this scaffolded worksheet seeks to assist students in developing their own understanding of the difference between a quarrel and an argument in order to clarify the rhetorical and epistemological purpose of an argument. You might find the the teacher’s copy of the worksheet useful.

This lesson opens with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of to damn with faint praise, the use of which in a review I will take as a given.

Happy Fourth of July! I bid you a restful day and evening.

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.

Write It Right: Depot for Station

“Depot for Station. ‘Railroad depot.’ A depot is a place of deposit; as, a depot of supply for an army.”

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