Friday January 27, 2012
Some of the most frequently visited pages on this website are quizzes--matching, editing, and multiple-choice quizzes on topics that include English usage, spelling, word origins, and figures of speech. In case you've missed any of them, here are ten of the most popular quizzes at About Grammar & Composition.
- A Quick Quiz on Capitalization
Capitalization has been called a "squishy" subject that "lacks logic," but as this editing quiz demonstrates, certain guidelines are worth attending to.
- A Quick Quiz on the History of the English Language
This quiz will test your familiarity with some of the key events identified in our Timeline of the English Language.
- A Quick Quiz on Tricky English Plurals
As this quiz shows, forming plurals in English is sometimes more (or less) than a matter of adding -s to a noun.
- A Quick Quiz on Commonly Confused Words: 20 Proverbs
Enjoy two lessons in one: a quiz on commonly confused words packed in proverbial wisdom.
- Reading Quiz on the Gettysburg Address
Test your knowledge of a speech that has been called both a prose poem and a prayer.
- Reading Quiz on "A Modest Proposal" by Jonathan Swift
This multiple-choice reading quiz will test your understanding of one of the most savage and powerful essays in English.
- Review Quiz: Rhetorical Terms
This quiz should help you understand, distinguish, and remember many of the most common figures of speech in our Tool Kit for Rhetorical Analysis.
- Would You Repeat That, Please?
Match the names of these ten repetitive figures of speech with the appropriate definitions and examples.
- Quiz on 25 Commonly Misspelled Words
See if you can identify the correctly spelled word in each set.
- Vocabulary Builder: Mark Twain's Words
The words in this vocabulary quiz have been drawn from seven of Mark Twain's most famous essays.
More Quizzes:
Wednesday January 25, 2012
When Sir Winston Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953, the Swedish Academy heralded both his "mastery of historical and biographical description" and his "brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values." In the first volume of his autobiography, My Early Life, Churchill explained how he developed this talent for language at Harrow School in London, where he was compelled to study English because he wasn't considered bright enough to learn Latin and Greek.
[B]y being so long in the lowest form I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys. They all went on to learn Latin and Greek and splendid things like that. But I was taught English. We were considered such dunces that we could learn only English. Mr. Somervell--a most delightful man, to whom my debt is great--was charged with the duty of teaching the stupidest boys the most disregarded thing--namely, to write mere English. He knew how to do it. He taught it as no one else has ever taught it. Not only did we learn English parsing thoroughly, but we also practised continually English analysis. Mr. Somervell had a system of his own. He took a fairly long sentence and broke it up into its components by means of black, red, blue, and green inks. Subject, verb, object: Relative Clauses, Conditional Clauses, Conjunctive and Disjunctive Clauses! Each had its colour and its bracket. It was a kind of drill. We did it almost daily. As I remained in the Third Form three times as long as anyone else, I had three times as much of it. I learned it thoroughly. Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence--which is a noble thing. And when in after years my schoolfellows who had won prizes and distinction for writing such beautiful Latin poetry and pithy Greek epigrams had to come down again to common English, to earn their living or make their way, I did not feel myself at any disadvantage. Naturally I am biased in favor of boys learning English. I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat. But the only thing I would whip them for is not knowing English, I would whip them hard for that.
(My Early Life: A Roving Commission, Thornton Butterworth [UK] and Charles Scribner's Sons [US], 1930)
You won't find many sentences being
parsed in English classes today. That sort of grammatical analysis was discredited decades ago as a dreary and pointless exercise in taxonomy. And when conducted by teachers less gifted than Robert Somervell, often it was.
Yet I confess to sharing Churchill's bias. Convinced that the essential structure of a sentence remains "a noble thing," I too would like to "make them all learn English."
More About Analyzing Sentences:
Image: Winston Churchill in 1884 (from The Life and Times of Winston Churchill, Odhams Press, 1946)
Monday January 23, 2012
Worry about words, Bobby. Your grandmother is right. For, whatever else you may do, you will be using words always. All day, and every day, words matter. Though you live in a barrel and speak to nobody but yourself, words matter. For words are the tools of thought.
(A.P. Herbert, What a Word! 1935)
In the article Writers on Words, twenty authors share their thoughts on the nature and value of words. Here are some further reflections.
- Fertilizing the Vocabulary
One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.
(Evelyn Waugh, The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Michael Davie, 1976)
- Creating With Words
Words are the works of art that make possible science.
Words are the abstractions that make possible poetry.
Words signify man's refusal to accept the world as it is.
With words man has been able to create a world, and it is fitting that the author of Genesis should have proposed that the world of sense experience, too, was created with words.
(Walter Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosophy, 1978)
- Words As Weapons
Words are loaded pistols.
(Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature? 1966)
- Words As Drugs
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
(Rudyard Kipling, speech delivered on February 14, 1923)
- Foes of Reality
Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.
(Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes, 1911)
- Empty Words
Juan wondered if words meant anything at all. Certainly they rarely meant as much as their users thought, and often they were meaningless as a bullfrogs' chorus. Nine-tenths of all words were parrot-noises, not weighed, savoured, and tested, but merely repeated; a token coinage, defaced by long usage . . ..
(Erik Linklater, Juan in America, 1931)
- The Meanings of Words
The meanings of words are NOT in the words; they are in us.
(S.I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action, 1941)
- The Ethics of Words
Words and the meanings of words are not matters merely for the academic amusement of linguists and logisticians, or for the aesthetic delight of poets; they are matters of the profoundest ethical significance to every human being.
(Aldous Huxley, Words and Their Meanings, 1940)
- Associations
A word can sweep by your ear and by its very sound suggest hidden meanings, preconscious association. Listen to these words: blood, tranquil, democracy. You know what they mean literally but you have associations with those words that are cultural, as well as your own personal associations.
(Rita Mae Brown, Starting From Scratch, 1988)
- Arrangements
Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects.
(Blaise Pascal, Pensees, 1670)
More About Words:
Friday January 20, 2012
Contrary to legend, most writers don't rely on alcohol for inspiration.
It's true that a number of famous American writers struggled with alcoholism--Faulkner, O'Neill, Fitzgerald, and Cheever, just for a start. But even Ernest Hemingway, who consumed prodigious quantities of booze throughout his life (and whose fictional characters did the same), said that he depended on alcohol not to begin working but to stop--that is, to relax after a productive day of writing.
So how did Hemingway prepare to write? By sharpening 20 pencils.
Over a century ago, columnist Genevieve L. Brown identified some of the rituals followed by authors to "produce an exaltation not far short of the exuberance of inspiration." Here are some examples.
- Victor Hugo wrote standing up (as did Thomas Wolfe, who used the top of a refrigerator for a table).
- John Calvin wrote in bed (as did John Milton, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Colette, and many others).
- Montaigne often wrote with a cat in his lap. ("When I play with my cat," he wrote, "who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?")
- Alexander Pope warmed up by pacing around his study and declaiming at the top of his lungs.
- German poet Friedrich Schiller "often put his feet in hot water to facilitate the circulation of blood in his brain."
- Balzac dressed as a monk and drank gallons of black coffee.
To learn more about writers' rituals, see Genevieve Brown's "The Peculiar Habits of Writers at Work."
And to let us know about your writing habits, peculiar or not, click on "comments" below.
More About Writers at Work:
