Tag Archives: punctuation

A Learning Support on Using Quotation Marks

Posted on July 14, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a learning support on using quotation marks. This is quite a bit of text, some of which, especially the material on typography and word processing software, but that’s only a paragraph, so you’re still stuck with a two-page document.

In any case, this is, to flog this tiresome point again, a Microsoft Word document. In other words, you can do just about anything you want with it. I can see how it could be broken into several pieces and those pieces made into practice worksheets. It’s yours now.

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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A Learning Support on the Use of Parentheses

Posted on July 9, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a learning support on the use of parentheses. I’ve published quite a few of these recently; they have all been excerpted from Paul Brians’ book Common Errors in English Usage, which he has posted at the Washington State University website.

This document is really only a paragraph of text, so there is a big blank field on the page. In other words, plenty of room to write some exercises for students to practice using parentheses correctly. Because it is a Microsoft Word document, you have plenty of ways to convert it to your favorite word processor and adapt it for the needs of your classroom.

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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A Learning Support on Using Hyphens and Dashes

Posted on July 7, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a learning support on using hyphens and dashes. If you scroll down about 17 posts below this one, you’ll find another learning support simply on hyphenation. As always, Paul Brians does a nice job of presenting the key issues on these forms of punctuation.

Incidentally, if you like Paul Brians’ work, stay tuned here for more of it; I drafted a little over one hundred worksheets using text from his book Common Errors in English Usage–which Professor Brians, amazingly, has made available in its entirety on the Washington State University website. Just punch that hyperlink–and you’re there!

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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A Learning Support on Hyphenation

Posted on July 2, 2021 | Leave a comment

OK, moving along on this cool, rainy morning in Southwestern Vermont, here is a learning support on hyphenation. Like several others I have posted here recently, this text comes from Paul Brians’ book, which, amazingly, he has made available at no cost on the Washington State University website, Common Errors in English Usage.

As Professor Brians points out, for a full exposition on the rules for hyphenation in English prose one really must consult The Chicago Manual of Style or something like it. This document does supply as much about hyphenation as the high-school, and perhaps even the college, writer needs to know.

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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A Learning Support on Using Colons and Semicolons

Posted on June 30, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a learning support on using colons and semicolons in compound sentences. Like a number of these published on this blog recently, this is from Paul Brians’ fine book Common Errors in English Usage.

This passage is a little more than half of the page. There is plenty of room to add supported examples, structured exercises, or whatever else best suits the needs of your classroom. It’s formatted in Microsoft Word, so it is easily exportable and manipulable.

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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Ellipsis

Posted on June 15, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Ellipsis: A figure of speech in which a word or number of words, which have little to the logical construction of the sentence, are left out and supplied by the reader.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

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A Learning Support on the Stylistic and Typographical Conventions for Using Numbers in Prose

Posted on June 15, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a learning support on the conventions for writing numbers in prose. This document has a big open field, and is in Microsoft Word, so it is at your–and more importantly, your students’–disposal; you can modify or adapt it to your needs.

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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Term of Art: Diacritic, Diacritical Mark

Posted on June 13, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Diacritic, Diacritical Mark (noun): A distinguishing mark given to a character or letter to indicated stress or pronunciation, such as a superscribed accent; phonetic sign. Adjective: diacritic, diacritical.

‘The ‘etymons,’ as he called them were the root terms for Pass and Fail, but inflected with prefixes, infixes, suffixes, and diacritical marks to such an extent, and so variously from fragment to fragment, that conflicting interpretations, in his opinion, could be said to figure the intellectual biography of studentdom, as has been amply demonstrated in a wealth of what he called Geistesgeschichten…. John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy.'”

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

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A Learning Support on Five Kinds of Sentences

Posted on April 27, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a learning support on five kinds of sentences. I grabbed this from Sylvan Barnet and Marcia Stubbs’ Barnet and Stubbs Practical Guide to Writing with Readings, Seventh Edition (New York: Harper Collins, 1995). I used an earlier edition of this book for the very first college course I took in the spring of 1990. When I mentioned my admiration for the utility and ease of use of the book, a friend of mine thoughtfully made me a gift of the edition cited above.

Anyway, this learning support doesn’t deal with the four kinds of sentences, i.e. declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory, for which I am currently preparing learning supports which will appear here in the near future. This document deals with syntactical structures, to wit, the simple, compound, complex, and complex-compound sentences, as well as the sentence fragment. It’s one page, so it’s simple but (I hope) helpful because of that simplicity.

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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A Concluding Assessment Lesson on Adverbs

Posted on April 21, 2021 | Leave a comment

If you search “lesson plan on adverbs” on this blog, you will find that there are a total of seven lesson plans dealing with this part of speech; here is the concluding assessment for the unit those seven lessons comprise.

I open this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the proverb “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” Because this lesson all but inevitably runs into a second day, here is another Cultural Literacy worksheet, this one on the idiom “six of one, a half dozen of the other.” Finally, here is the structured worksheet, which closely follows the sequence of the aforementioned seven lessons, that is the primary work of this lesson and the concluding assessment of this seven-lesson unit.

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.

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