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 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...

Further to my recent post examining the effectiveness of software designed to assist with grammar, punctuation, and style, I wanted to find out whether it was possible to score 100% on the grammarly.com software. I tried to test www.grammarly.com by using text taken from their own website. That does not work, however, as they recognize their own work and they have already marked it as 'perfection.' They award themselves 100% for their own work. Is that surprising? Nonetheless, if we select text from www.grammarcheck.net, their text has a variety of errors - according  to www.grammarly.com. Similarly, text taken from the  www.grammarly.com website fares badly when it is tested by www.grammarcheck.net. These results suggest that the software programmes have not managed to create a reliable and universal system that successfully tests and verifies grammar, style and punctuation. Whichever system is used there is a typical 35% reporting of errors in the text submitted. C...

The march of technology into every corner of contemporary education often leads to the harsh judgment that traditional teachers have become - or will soon become - a redundant human resource.  Are the rumours of pedagogic extinction justified? With the perfection of advanced linguistic software, a brave new world of error-free writing has emerged. Machine-generated clarity and precision is leading us to a written world that will be ruthlessly stripped of recurring lapses and common mistakes. Foggy chasms of fatal confusion will be banished from the linguistic ecology of the planet. There will be no more sleepless nights; no more worrying about the comma splice, sentence fragments, and dangling modifiers. Indeed, an inexpensive monthly subscription provides an enticing opportunity to join the new democratic republic of letters - a nation of automated stop-keepers. After all, the technology has now conquered the checking of spelling, grammar and style. Indeed, some of th...

That's my last sentence on this topic. Ever. In your view, what are the TOP TEN problems that students experience in their writing? Obviously, it depends quite a lot on the age group, their experience, and whether English is their first language. In this blog I'm thinking about weaker students, aged 11+. It is clear, however, that many of the problems also affect the work of undergraduates and adult business people. And we're constantly striving to improve our writing, as earlier versions of this informal post would undoubtedly demonstrate. In my experience, many common writing problems are persistent and recurrent. Is a quick fix really that difficult? Do you make of a checklist for your students? How do you empower your students to take more professional care and control of their work? Any ideas? Here is my draft list: Many sentences that need a verb don't have one. There is a tendency to use phrases, or sentence fragments, rather than senten...

Connected Brain Zones § 371. IV. The use of connectives . The words of connection and transition between clauses, members, and sentences, may be made, according to the skill or the awkwardness of the writer, sources of strength or of weakness. It is always a source of weakness for two prepositions, having different antecedents, to be co-ordinated in connection with a common subsequent . This mode of expression has been called "the splitting of particles;" a name not very applicable to it as it occurs in English construction. The proper name for it is the one implied in the italicized words above. The following is an example. "Though personally unknown to, I have always been an admirer of, Mr. Calhoun." The way to correct it is to complete the first clause, and let the last, if either, be elliptic; thus: "Though personally unknown to Mr. Calhoun, I have always admired him," or "been an admirer of him." It is pro...

'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...

Boys are underperforming by 10% or more, compared to girls' literacy. My experience working with boys and adolescents (9-15) in the last year has taught me that they do not have an insurmountable problem with reading or writing. But far too often they are being forced to answer tedious comprehension questions. Or they are pushed into commenting critically on subjects that do not relate at all to their interests. Research shows that often boys visualize reading as a female activity. So some of the problems are part of the current culture and construction of reading as an activity. At first, the key to success, in my view, is to work with their existing interests. That means that you need to find out what fires their imagination. In an overcrowded classroom that is sometimes difficult, and there is a tendency for the whole class to work on the same topics such as "Africa," or "Environment," or "Superheroes." The young people I've worked wi...