The English Miscellany

This practice book will help you to explore the strange world of shuffled sentences and how your brain solves them.  A shuffled sentence is a string of words that have been jumbled up. The words are in the wrong order. Can you unscramble the words to make a sentence?  • An excellent INTRODUCTION to the art and science of solving these linguistic challenges.  • TWENTY techniques that could help you to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your exam tactics and strategy.  • FIVE levels of difficulty, which makes it ideal for exam preparation for various kinds of school entrance exams such as 11+ and other employment proficiency tests.  • 595 shuffled sentences to use for your exam practice.  • Some of the tests involve deciding on a word that is not needed in the sentence. This is called a REDUNDANT word.  • Some of the tests ask you to find the LAST WORD in the sentence.  • The tests are designed to practise VOCABULARY and GRAMMAR (different ...

This petition was submitted during the 2010–2015 Conservative – Liberal Democrat coalition government; the deadline 30 March 2015. At the time is attracted only 366 signatures, despite being widely circulated as a link on social media. Petition: End of GCSE English Literature for All, 2017 GCSE English Literature from 2017 will require students to remember between 15 and 18 (depending on exam board) poems in an exam in order to 'closely analyse' them. Signatories ask government to consult with the English teaching community as to whether this is the fairest and most meaningful way of assessing students' understanding and appreciation of poetry. There has been no such consultation on this matter to date. Meanwhile the learning of poetry for public recitation is increasingly popular. Moving beyond the controversial rote-learning for exams issue, this blog explores some of the advantages and disadvantages of learning poetry for pu...

“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.” --- Charlie Chaplin. "Dramatic comedy, from which fictional comedy is mainly descended, has been remarkably tenacious of its structural principles and character types." (Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism ) "The days of Comedy are gone, alas! When Congreve's fool could vie with Moliere's bete :   Society is smooth'd to that excess,  That manners hardly differ more than dress." --- Byron "Man is the merriest species of the creation, all above and below him are serious." --- Addison “This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.” --- Horace Walpole. “Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.” --- Peter Ustinov “The duty of comedy is to correct men by amusing them.” --- Moliere. "In the hands of a comic genius the pretence of stupidity is the triumph of irony." "In my mind, the...

Gielgud as Hamlet People have become very grumpy about the use of -ize . We always spell several common words as follows: advertise, advise, arise, chastise, circumcise, compromise, despise, devise, disenfranchise, enterprise, excise, exercise, franchise, improvise, incise, merchandise, revise, supervise, surmise, surprise, televise. It is not true that -ize reveals an American usage, as it has been frequently used in British English for centuries. Those who want to be super-pedantic claim that -ize should be selected in cases where the classical Greek verb deployed the -izo ending. As far back as the thirteenth century we find examples of usages such as baptize . My preference is to use -ize . What's yours?   Dr Ian McCormick is the author of The Art of Connection: the Social Life of Sentences and 11+ English    

Getting on top of the drama exam I've been trawling the exam boards and internet sites for examples of A-level / IB exam/essay questions on Drama. These questions are suitable for 16-18 year-olds. If you are 'lost for ideas' also take a critical look at my TWO compilations of key quotations : Tragedy: Selected Quotations Comedy: famous quotes Exam / Essay Questions: 1. Using two or three plays you have studied, compare the presentation of two or three characters [e.g. introduction, dramatic interactions with other characters], saying in each case how the presentation furthered the dramatists' purposes, and how it rewarded your study. 2. 'While the momentum of the play is carried by major characters, there is often a significant minor character who is a catalyst for change or enlightenment.' Compare the role of a significant minor character in in plays you have studied, showing how these characters contribute to the dramatic action. ...

An Examination of the role of CHARACTER in literary texts Superficially ... “A person in a story, someone we can relate to, or identify with ...” But Note: Caricature – 2-dimensinal, simple, represents one value, e.g. the angry man, jealousy = related to allegory and satire = distortion for effect of one quality, or exaggeration of certain features; stereotypes Narrative functions – hero/villain, trickster, false hero, magician, father/son, mother/daughter, outcast, rebel. In real life people that we come to know well are seldom just functions or caricatures. Real living people in the media, or celebrities, often have an assumed character or role that might be quite different from how they are in their personal life. In texts, an assumed role is called a persona , in the media we even talk about ‘personalities’ to express the public projection of a role. Perceptions of role or character can also be manipulated e.g. spin doctors and propagandists ma...

Today I am sharing the FURTHER READING list published in my book The Art of Connection: the Social Life of Sentences (Quibble Academic 2013): Amidon, Arlene. "Children's understanding of sentences with contingent relations: Why are temporal and conditional connectives so difficult?" Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 22.3 (1976): 423-437. Astington, Janet Wilde, Janette Pelletier, and Bruce Homer. "Theory of mind and epistemological development: The relation between children's second-order false-belief understanding and their ability to reason about evidence." New Ideas in Psychology 20.2 (2002): 131-144. Bakewell, Sarah. How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer . Vintage, 2011. Baker, Linda. "Comprehension monitoring: Identifying and coping with text confusions." Journal of Literacy Research 11.4 (1979): 365-374. Bates, Elisabeth, Philip S. Dale, and Donna Thal. ...