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 ...

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    

This stimulating guide to Year 5/6 and 11+ English provides an excellent resource for children making the transition from primary to secondary school. 11+ English offers helpful and clear guidance for tutors and parents. The six test papers use multiple choice questions to ensure that a student’s answers can be marked efficiently and academic progress can be monitored effectively. Year 5/6 11+ English benefits from the following features: - 300 multiple choices questions - An introduction to communication skills for parents and tutors - How to improve reading and comprehension skills - Key skills for success in English comprehension tests - The critical and creative training zone - Pathways to success - Six English Tests examine comprehension and grammar - 52 Creative writing activities - A Glossary / 62 Key terms explained Available on Amazon . "An extremely engaging collection of texts and enquiries which serve as a catalyst to enable student...

'Scott has spent pages and pages upon describing a country scene, this is very uninteresting, but it is intensely good literature.' ( T he Newbolt Report: “The Teaching of English in England” (1921)) In popular literature description appears to have been devalued in favour of character and plot. Description can be enjoyable in itself, but often it relates to, and helps to build the plot, mood, character, or atmosphere.  In our busy modern world perhaps we feel that we don’t have time to wallow in description. I have heard some writers saying that they don't bother doing the scene setting any more. This is sad. In fact, our age is one of immense (simulated) visual and sonic richness and variety. Never have we had such an immense range of sensory stimuli. Nonetheless, we are often so caught up in the flow that we lack either the creative engagement or the critical detachment that would enable the production of delightful or striking descriptive prose. Desc...

In recent years we have moved a long way from teacher-led Practical Criticism Q&A. As learners we are always searching for fun ways to explore texts. Experience demonstrates that allowing children to be creative is an excellent way to build critical engagement. Fun means deeper learning, and in my view, play cultivates questions. So let's have the courage to allow our students to play with plots and create their own interpretations of them. This approach need not displace traditional literary/critical writing exercises. Rather, it serves as a way of incubating enjoyable and engaging point(s) of entry to the text. How does this approach work? I'm not going to write up a detailed lesson plan, but you will find a short case study below. The newspaper model can be adapted to any text. (I recently worked with this approach using Charles Dickens's Great Expectations .) The project briefly sketched below will also help the learners to be more aware of style, tone, a...