How can students use the Visual Thesaurus to learn more about how transition words and phrases play important roles in both the writing and the reading processes?  Continue reading...

Last week, in the first part of this series on buzzwords and catchphrases of the current political season, I looked at six words that caught the national attention, from brokered convention to grandiosity. Here, in alphabetical order, are another half dozen more that have crossed my political radar.  Continue reading...

Am I "different than" you? Or "different from " you? And does it matter?

"Different than is often considered inferior to different from," Garner's Modern American Usage says. We certainly don't want to be inferior.  Continue reading...

Mark Peters reviews The Dictionary of Modern Proverbs: "When you talk about proverbs, it's hard not to add the adjective old: we tend to think of proverbs as remnants of the bygone days of yore, not the present days of non-yore."  Continue reading...

When news emerged that Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin was renouncing his American citizenship to avoid taxes related to Facebook's IPO, two senators reacted by proposing legislation that would go after the likes of Saverin. Senators Chuck Schumer and Bob Casey said it was time to "defriend" Saverin, and they announced a bill called the Expatriation Prevention by Abolishing Tax-Related Incentives for Offshore Tenancy Act, or the Ex-PATRIOT Act for short.  Continue reading...

Bob Greenman is an award-winning educator who spent 30 years in Brooklyn, New York teaching English and journalism at James Madison and Edward R. Murrow High Schools. Here he recalls how he he used objects encountered in everyday life as the inspiration for enjoyable and effective vocabulary instruction.  Continue reading...

The suffix -ify means "to make," and you will commonly find it forming the ending of some tricky transitive verbs (e.g., petrify: to make into stone; rectify: to make right). Using this week's worksheet, teachers can have students look up some -ify verbs in the Visual Thesaurus, learn their definitions, and then write original sentence for each verb by using a sentence frame as their guide.  Continue reading...