The U.S. presidential election is six months away, but the Republican debates and primary contests have already gone on for more than a year. The long campaign has meant plenty of exposure to that special genre of language known as political speech.
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The U.S. presidential election is six months away, but the Republican debates and primary contests have already gone on for more than a year. The long campaign has meant plenty of exposure to that special genre of language known as political speech.
Continue reading...
Wordshop
Vocab activities for your classroom
Teaching Verbs and Confronting the Skunk
May 15, 2012
By Georgia Scurletis
If "grammar is the skunk at the garden party of the language arts," how can teachers confront the skunk when it comes to explaining how verbs work?
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What keeps writing alive? The truth of life. Getting the truth into words is our only hope for immortality. Writing that speaks falsely about life dwindles down to death in a matter of decades.
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Word Count
Writers Talk About Writing
How to Handle Criticism of Your Writing
May 14, 2012
How are you at handling criticism? I don't mean comments about your driving or your housework or your management style. I'm talking about criticism of your writing.
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Automatically create lists of vocabulary from any text
using the Visual Thesaurus VocabGrabber.
The podcast Lexicon Valley tackles knotty language issues in an engaging manner. Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield finish a three-part series on language and gender by looking at the struggles over the absence of a gender-neutral pronoun in English. They talk to University of Michigan professor Anne Curzan about the case for singular "they" to fill the gap. Listen to the podcast here, and catch our own interview with Curzan here.
A holiday has been created out of thin air and promoted by a blogger named Shaun McCance: Passive Voice Day, to be celebrated by one and all today. Appreciation for the passive voice can be shown by using the hashtag #passivevoiceday on Twitter. As has been said by Shaun, "It's just enjoyed when things are taken to an absurd extreme." Attention has been paid from San Francisco to Australia. More can be read here.
Wild Words of Children's Literature, from "Runcible" to "Rumpus"
May 11, 2012
- 4 Comments
Stop the Madness: A Plea for Grammar Laxity
May 8, 2012
- 8 Comments
It's Getting "Meta" All the Time
May 7, 2012
- 5 Comments
Tracking Down the Roots of a "Super" Word
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April 23, 2012
- 7 Comments
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A Pre-Reading Activity for "The Hunger Games"
April 10, 2012
How can categorizing words from Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games help introduce students to the major themes of the novel?
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Happy Arbor Day from everyone at the Visual Thesaurus! We're celebrating with an arboreal crossword puzzle. Solve it and you could win a Visual Thesaurus T-shirt!
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We've just released a new version of the Visual Thesaurus that works for the iPad and the iPhone, at no extra cost to subscribers. And whether you're using the VT in your Web browser, on your iPhone, or on your iPad, you'll enjoy lightning-fast load times.
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