This week's worksheet introduces students to a whole host of animal adjectives that they can use in their descriptive writing and add to their insult arsenals. It's so much more fun to refer to someone's eating habits as "porcine" instead of just saying they "eat like a pig," right?  Continue reading...

Before I began teaching, I had assumed that the many stories I had heard about how students don't like poetry were just myths. After all, I liked (some) poetry, so why wouldn't my students like (some) poetry? But unlike nearly every other myth I've dismissed in my time as a teacher, the one about poetry proved to be true: Nothing makes my students whine more than being handed a poem.  Continue reading...

We're happy to feature another installment of James Harbeck's Word Tasting Notes, this time on geoduck: "This word, at first sight, seems to be a paradoxical mix: geo says 'earth' to us, and duck says 'waterfowl.' Put them together and you have something that is, as the saying goes, neither fish nor fowl."  Continue reading...

Merrill Perlman looks at the way that the "drink/drank/drunk" verb paradigm is changing, and advises you how to derive "drunk" (but please, don't drive drunk).  Continue reading...

While the semicolon has long been a favorite topic of discussion at grammarian cocktail parties, the fact that this intermediate piece of punctuation has leapt from its place in linguistics to make a cameo appearance in not one, but two Broadway shows, is surely a sign that things are currently very right, and very write, on the Great White Way.  Continue reading...