OK, lastly on this relatively cool morning in Brooklyn, here is a glossary of competitive debate terms that might come in handy if you’re involved in such things.
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.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged learning supports, philosophy/religion
When the English teacher with whom I work recently introduced Stephanie Ericsson’s essay “The Ways We Lie” late last week, I’d never previously seen it. If you search it, you’ll see that it is evidently in use in a number of schools around the country. It’s not especially profound, but it does touch on some of the my philosophical issues that lying and truth-telling raise. Ms. Ericsson has enjoyed a successful career as a writer and and actor, the latter of which surprised me.
In any case, here is a copy of the essay itself along with a contextual and learning support that I composed to attend it. The essay is in Microsoft Word, though I didn’t render it so, so I cannot vouch for it accuracy or fidelity; the contextual and learning support I did write, and, as below, if you find any problems with it, please advise. I copy-edited it twice, which doesn’t mean it doesn’t contain lapses or errors. There is a reason why professional writers–which I am not, alas–use the services of their publishers’ copy-editing offices.
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.
In response to a student question the other day about the difference between prose and poetry–the prose poem “A Story About the Body” by Robert Hass was that day’s lesson in our English class and occasioned the question–I whipped up this learning support on the literary terms poetry, prose, and prose poem. This document is a single page with three short passages of text from Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. It’s basically a glossary.
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.
Here is a learning support on using infinitives in sentences. You know that to form of a verb, as in to install, to defenestrate (defenestration is the Word of the Day today at Merriam-Webster) and to stir. I’m working a range of new materials on using gerunds and infinitives in sentences–they’ll soon begin to appear here–and realized I needed a support on infinitives.
So here it is.
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.
Here is a learning support on writing the imperative sentence. This type of clause, as you know, issues an imperative, i.e. “the grammatical mood that expresses the will to influence the behavior of another.”
I wrote this document myself, synthesizing a variety of sources. I tried to keep this short, while integrating all the essential elements of this kind of construction–e.g. saying “please” when using an imperative sentence in speech or prose.
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.
Here is a learning support on writing the interrogative sentence. This is something I assembled myself using a variety of sources; it’s lengthy–two full pages of text with a number of examples.
In my experience, students struggle to write interrogative sentences. This points to a much bigger problem (and perhaps a fundamental failing in our educational systems and pedagogy) that I seek on a daily basis to solve in my classroom: students don’t really know how to ask questions. Since all learning begins with a question, this troubles me greatly, which is why I worked assiduously to create a support that would answer all students’ questions about, well, asking questions. I know I ask for this at the bottom of every documents post, but I would be especially grateful to you for your comments on this document.
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.
This week’s text is a lesson plan on the reflexive and intensive pronouns–i.e. myself, yourself, herself, himself, itself, ourselves, yourselves, and themselves–and their use in declarative sentences and expository prose.
I open this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the bibliography and its function in scholarly writing. In the event the lesson goes into a second day due to whatever classroom exigencies you encounter, you might want to use this Everyday Edit worksheet on Miranda rights (“You have the right to remain silent…” etc.) that the United States Constitution guarantees people when they are arrested. (Incidentally if you like Everyday Edit worksheets, don’t forget that the good people at Education World offer a year’s supply of them at no charge.)
Here is a learning support on reflexive and intensive pronouns that I distribute with this scaffolded worksheet that is the primary work of this lesson. Finally, here is the teacher’s copy of the worksheet that eases delivery of this material.
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.
Here is a learning support on writing the compound sentence with a semicolon and no conjunction. This is a full page of text, but like everything else here, you can do with it as you wish: it is formatted in Microsoft Word.
I have a lesson plan in the works on this piece of procedural knowledge, so check back if this is something you want your students to be able 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.
Here is a learning support on gerunds and pronouns. This is about a half-page of text, so there is room (and the latitude, since, like just about everything on this blog, this is a Microsoft Word document you can manipulate for your particular use) to make a worksheet of this should you see fit.
Basically, the text here explains the proper use of possessive pronouns following gerunds. It’s both simple and complicated at once, but as Paul Brians explains (this is drawn from his book Common Errors in English Usage), the advice in the passage will improve the quality of student writing.
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.
OK, on a rainy Sunday morning, here is a learning support on using single quotation marks. This is another piece of text culled from Paul Brians’ fine usage guide, Common Errors in English Usage, which you’ll find in its entirety on the Washington State University website under that hyperlink. The textual passage is a single, short paragraph. So there is a wide field for turning this into a worksheet, should you want or need to do so; as is mostly the case on Mark’s Text Terminal, this is a Microsoft Word document, so you can adapt it in any number of ways (including exporting it to another word processor) should you wish.
I don’t know about you, but I tend to be a stickler on this punctuation rule. In fact, it got me into trouble with a principal who didn’t understand the typographical rules and conventions for using double and single quotation marks; I l left an explanation of them, from a different style guide, in his mailbox after reading yet another of his cluttered, illegible memos. He didn’t appreciate 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.
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