Here is a learning support on using pronouns with gerunds. This is a half-page reading from Paul Brians’ excellent book Common Errors in English Usage, which you’ll find available to you, at no cost, under that hyperlink.
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.
“threshold hypothesis: The belief among advocates of bilingual education that individuals with high levels of proficiency in two languages experience cognitive advantages in language skills and intellectual growth over those with low levels of proficiency in two languages, who have significant cognitive deficits.”
Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.
Here is a learning support on gerunds and infinitives that accompanies a raft of new material I’ll be posting in the next several months on mastering the use of gerunds and infinitives in English prose. This thing, as it should be, I suppose, is self-explanatory.
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.
“Limners: Untutored American artists who executed naïve and literal portraits. Often itinerant, they worked mostly in the 18th and early 19th centuries.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
“What is a closet drama? It is a play, usually in verse, written for private reading rather than performance. Byron’s Manfred (1817) and Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820) are examples.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged drama/theater, professional development, readings/research
“The world is a garden fenced by the state * The state is power supported by law * Law is the policy which guides the ruler * The ruler is order protected by the army * The army are supporters sustained by money * Money is sustenance produced by subjects * Subjects are servants protected by justice * Justice is ingrained and is the support of the world
Aristotle’s Circle of Politics was elaborated by Ibn Khaldun to create the eight self-sustaining links in the chain of medieval statecraft.”
Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.
“Palindrome: (Greek ‘running back again’): A word or sentence (occasionally a verse) which reads the same both ways. Common words are: civic, level, minim, radar, rotor. Famous examples of such phrase or sentences are: (a) ‘Madam, I’m Adam’, to which the reply was ‘Sir, I’m Iris; (b) ‘Able was I ere I saw Elba’ (attributed apocryphally to Napoleon who, alas, spoke no English); (c) ‘Sums are not set as a test on Erasmus’; (d) ‘A man, a plan, a canal—Panama!’; (e) “’In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni’, said by moths in flight; (f) ‘Straw? No, too stupid a fad; I put soot on warts!’; (g) ‘Deliver desserts’, demanded Nemesis, emended named, stressed, reviled; (h) T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. I’d assign it a name: ‘Gnat dirt upset on drab pot toilet’ (by W.H. Auden); (i) Stop Syrian! I start at rats in airy spots; (j) Sex at noon taxes; (j) SIROMORIS—this was the telegraphic address on the writing paper of Edward Elgar (1857-1934), who was knighted and appointed OM. There are numerical palindromes. A simple example is: add 132 to 321 for the total 363.
The best known collection of verses was that produced by one Ambrose Pamperis in 1802. It consists of 416 palindromic verses recounting the campaigns of Catherine the Great.”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
“Vernacular: (Latin vernaculus “domestic, native, indigenous’) Domestic or native language. Now applied to the language used in one’s native country. It may also be used to distinguish between a ‘literary’ language and a dialect; for instance, William Barnes’s ‘vernacular poems,’ and outstanding example of dialect (q.v.) poetry.”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
“Formalism or Russian Formalism: Russian school of literary criticism that flourished 1914-28. Making use of the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, Formalists were concerned with what technical devices make a literary text literary, apart from its psychological, sociological, biographical, and historical elements. Though influenced by the Symbolist movement, they sought to make their analyses more objective and scientific than those of the Symbolists. The movement was condemned by the Soviet authorities in 1929 for its lack of political perspective. Later, it became influential in the West, notably in New Criticism and structuralism.”
Excerpted/Adapted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
“History: A seamless web linking past, present and future.
Contemporary Western society attempts to limit history to the past, as if it were the refuse of civilization. Individuals who hold power tend to see history only as mythology which can be manipulated to distract the citizenry, but is not useful in itself.
Among the different humanist areas of, history has nevertheless survived best the pseudo-scientific reduction of non-scientific learning to theoretically objective standards. The other cornerstones of humanism—literature and philosophy—have been severely damaged by the drive to quantify and objectify everything in sight. Intellectual accounting is not a synonym for thinking. Driven by this vain search for objectivity, literature and philosophy have come to resemble the obscure and controlling scholasticism of the Middle Ages.
If the historical approach has been able to resist these trends, it may be because power structures require a comforting background of mythology and mythology requires a sweep of civilization. Thus, history is welcome as a superficial generalization viewed at a hazy distance.
Our technocracy is frightened by the idea that ideas and events could be part of a large flow and therefore less controllable than expertise would like to suggest. For them, history is a conservative force which blocks the way to change and to new answers. In reality, history only becomes an active force when individuals deform it into a weapon for public manipulation. By that process it ceases to be history.
The twentieth century has been dominated by a catastrophic explosion of ideologies of which communism and fascism have been the most spectacular. Neo-conservatism is a recent minor example. The fleeting success of these ideologies has been made possible in part by the denial of history—or rather, by freezing history into narrow bands of logic, the sole purpose of which is to justify a specific ideology.
This does not mean that history becomes a beacon of truth when it is separated from ideology. History is not about truth but about continuity, and not about a limited dialectic but about an unlimited movement. To the extent that ethics remain in the foreground, history cannot be grossly deformed. The ethics which Western civilization has attempted to push forward for two and a half millennia are scarcely a secret. If anything, they have remained painfully obvious as one set of power structures after another has sought to marginalize or manipulate them. It is in this context that ideology most typically seeks to fix our attention on a single, conclusive pattern which can be presented as inevitable and which therefore carries a deformation of ethics.
These destructive experiences illustrate the value of history as a guarantor of both stability and change. It is neither a conservative nor a revolutionary force. Instead, history is a constant memory and its value lies in our ability to make it a highly conscious part of our lives. In an age which presents abstract analysis—a method that denies continuity and memory—as the sole respectable method of exercising power, history is perhaps the sole intact linear means of thought.”
Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston. The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.
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