Study English - Series 2: Episode Twenty Two - Phonics. Making sense of spelling - Gina Cooke. Usually when we spell a word, we only acknowledge the surface structure by naming out the letters: " these tools for understanding spelling in this free video gallery: working with your regular vocabulary or spelling words, study how you can use word sums and/or matrices to connect how words are spelled with what they mean and how they make sense.The English language is rich in homophones, words that sound the same, but have different meanings and thus different spellings.
Words like heel and heal or pain and pane are homophones. The spelling short graphic on The Homophone Principle, and investigate the following pairs of homophones:feat ~ feet; meet ~ meat; row ~ roe; mist ~ missed; profit ~ prophet; wine ~ whine; none ~ nun; peace ~ piece; knot ~ not ~ naught; rain ~ rein ~ reign; sense ~ cense ~ cents ~ scents a. What do each of these words mean? B. How are they built?
Three anti-social skills to improve your writing - Nadia Kalman. E.B.
White wrote, “The best writing is rewriting.” With that idea in mind, look at a few of the examples of ineffective dialogue in the blog post, “Bad Dialogue – Bad, Bad Dialogue,” by Beth Hill, at Now, select one example to rewrite and improve. If it’s repetitive, eliminate the repetition. If it’s too formal or stilted, mutter to yourself until you come up with a more natural-sounding version. The author Mark Twain is considered a master of dialogue, but his use of dialect – and particularly his phonetic rendering of African-American speech in the novel Huckleberry Finn – is the subject of controversy. . - An overview of various attitudes towards the novel in the PBS teachers’ guide to Huck Finn: - Leslie Gregory’s article, “Finding Jim Behind the Mask,” in Ampersand, available at - Webb Harris Jr.’s article, “Teaching Huck Finn Without Regret,” published by the Teaching Tolerance project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, available at For imagined conversations between H.G.
How did English evolve? - Kate Gardoqui. This is a great story.
But really, I made it sound way more simple than it really is. You probably have some questions already, if you’re a critical sort of person. Like: If the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Friesians all conquered areas of Celtic Britain, why is it that England is called England (which comes from Angle-land, the Land of the Angles) and not Saxonland or Juteland? If Old English has not been spoken since before the twelfth century, how do we know what it sounded like? When and how did Old English become the modern language that we speak today? Why is there a "b" in doubt? - Gina Cooke. This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English.
Etymologies are not definitions; they're explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago. We all know certain spelling errors are very common, such as miniscule or geneology. But how common exactly, and are they getting more or less common as time goes on? Spelling is the writing of one or more words with letters and diacritics. What is verbal irony? - Christopher Warner. Comma story - Terisa Folaron. A brief history of plural word...s - John McWhorter. Does texting mean the death of good writing skills?
John McWhorter posits that there’s much more to texting -- linguistically, culturally -- than it seems, and it’s all good news. See his TED Talk. John Hamilton McWhorter V (born 1965) is an American linguist and political commentator. He is the author of a number of books on language and on race relations. His research specialties are how creole languages form and how language grammars change as the result of sociohistorical phenomena. How To Improve Your Study Habits. Classroom Language.