English Department

[Kas1m]

Yeah the true sentence would be it is a good day. But at some points they dont include the apros whatever it is.

 

[Tilmeez]

Mr. czgibson defined it well in first page, i beleive.

The easy way to remember it is that "it's" with an apostrophe always means "it is", whereas "its" always means "belonging to it".

trust this helps.

 

[Kas1m]

Mr. czgibson defined it well in first page, i beleive.


trust this helps.

Thankyou

 

[Zahida]

Nice one!!!! I am an English teacher and teach year seven English. We also do something called morphographs which helps.

I have been doing this job for nine years now, i find that slang is quite common and use of English grammer quite unknown, not just the writing, but the way the children read and speak and write.

Morphographs also help with pronounciation eg. What. W.H.A.T spells what
wot???????????:bump1:

 

[Zahida]

Remember it's quality not quantity what we annoying teachers expect!!

Stick to the point and answer the question you will be marked and assessed on whether you managed to answer the question or not!!

Punctuation and grammer does help.............:thankyou:

Greetings Callum,

Firstly, your post was extremely helpful! Incidentally, I've just been writing my final draft of a poetry essay to hand in tomorrow, which leads me on to my question:

Do English teachers enjoy giving students essays to write or something? Seriously, there's only so much a student can take, especially when they have so many forums to visit and so little time to visit them in!

Finally, haben sie any tips for essay writing that you can share? It'd be invaluable!

Regards,

Der Grand Ozzenator

 

[czgibson]

Greetings,

Tilmeez has quoted me talking about "its" and "it's", and I've just noticed that I made a mistake - how embarrassing! :-[

"It's" can also mean "it has", like in this sentence:

It's been raining all day.

I think I deserve to be hit over the head with Swan's Practical English Usage several times. That's the best book to look at, incidentally, if you're unsure about any aspect of English grammar and usage.




Pk has asked this:

Erm when looking at a text from old english and that how can you tell what century it is from? 'Cause in our exam, we might for example get a text from the nineteenth century and we have to say which one it is, argh this is too difficult for me

This sounds like a test of how wide your reading is. Here are a couple of tips:

Anglo-Saxon uses some different letters from modern English, so is easy to spot. Here is a page about thorn, one of them. Here is the opening of the most famous Anglo-Saxon text, Beowulf.

Middle English (the language of the great Geoffrey Chaucer) looks like this. Read several pages of it and you'll find it easy to recognise in the future.

If you notice words that look like English words, but which aren't spelled in our normal way, there's a good chance you're looking at something that's pre-18th century. That's when English spelling began to be formalised, as the first dictionaries arrived. Either that or it's text-speak or similar slang, which should be easy to spot.

Formal 18th century writing often contains Capital Letters in the middle of sentences to indicate Important Concepts.

Any mention of technology or current events will help to specify a date of writing. If you have a text in front of you that you think is 18th century, but then it mentions a television, that will obviously change your dating.

Those are just a few general tips. If you want to get specific, you'll need to read plenty of examples of writing from the different centuries. Here is a list of authors whose work can be said to be fairly representative of the writing of their times. Pick a period, and read a few pages from each of them. That should begin to give you a feel for how the language has changed over time. Don't try to do this all in one go - it will take time. Here's the list:

14th century:

Geoffrey Chaucer
John Gower
John Wycliffe
William Langland

15th century:

John Lydgate
Reginald Pecock
Thomas Malory
William Caxton

16th century:

Thomas More
Philip Sidney
Thomas Nashe
Raphael Holinshed
Edmund Spenser

I should of course mention William Shakespeare (1564-1616) at this point.

17th century:

Francis Bacon
John Donne
Robert Burton
Thomas Browne
Thomas Hobbes
John Milton
Andrew Marvell
John Dryden

18th century

Jonathan Swift
Samuel Johnson
Alexander Pope
Joseph Addison
Richard Steele
Daniel Defoe
Henry Fielding
Laurence Sterne
Edward Gibbon

The Romantics (roughly 1780-1830)

William Blake
William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Byron
Percy Shelley
John Keats
Mary Shelley

The Victorians (1837 onwards)

Thomas Carlyle
Charles Dickens
William Thackeray
Emily, Charlotte and Anne Brontë
Robert and Elizabeth Browning
George Eliot

20th century

Far too many to choose from in the age of mass-publishing, so here are just a few to look at:

Thomas Hardy
Joseph Conrad
Bertrand Russell
D. H. Lawrence
James Joyce
Virginia Woolf
George Orwell
Ernest Hemingway
Anthony Burgess


The 20th century should be easier to spot than some of the others, of course.

Remember, your task is to get a feel for the writing of each period. Choose one period a week to immerse yourself in, and read a few pages from each of these writers each night. It's possible to find texts of much of their work online. There is also the library, of course. A few minutes a night, and you'd be able to get a very clear sense of what English looks like at different periods in history.

I'm not suggesting you have to go out and read every writer's complete works - you don't need to do that if all you want to do is get a feel for the language of their times.

[However, there are lots of other reasons for reading their works. These are among the very greatest writers in English.]

I hope this is helpful for you. Let me know what you think.

Peace

 

[Kas1m]

I try to write english stories with whatever i know and i have reached 130,000 word story(mostly translating from another lang) and i think im lacking a bit of description.
Just last week i finished carrie by stephen king and he uses a lot of metaphors and he takes a lot of length explaining one scene or situation. Do you think he writes good?

 

[Pk_#2]

Greetings,

Haaaallo! =)

This sounds like a test of how wide your reading is. Here are a couple of tips:

Anglo-Saxon uses some different letters from modern English, so is easy to spot. Here is a page about thorn, one of them. Here is the opening of the most famous Anglo-Saxon text, Beowulf.

Cool,

We're lookin' at Beowulf, I thinks it's recently been made into a film :rollseyes Oh and the Battle of Maldon, forgot who it was by...

Middle English (the language of the great Geoffrey Chaucer) looks like this. Read several pages of it and you'll find it easy to recognise in the future.

Cool, thank you for the link, we're looking at chaucers 'wife of Bath' which is dud to translate ZzZz I'm on line 333 and it goes up to 1237!! :exhausted If you could translate that for me I would be extremely grateful, no wait cheating is bad imsad VERY BAD!

If you notice words that look like English words, but which aren't spelled in our normal way, there's a good chance you're looking at something that's pre-18th century. That's when English spelling began to be formalised, as the first dictionaries arrived. Either that or it's text-speak or similar slang, which should be easy to spot.

Cool, but theres so many, we're looking at:

-Old English
-Middle English
-Renaissance
-Elizabethan
-Restoration
-Georgian
-Augustan
-Romantic
-Modern
-Post modern

So what dates go with each of these....Hmmm..

+o(

Formal 18th century writing often contains Capital Letters in the middle of sentences to indicate Important Concepts.

Is that the one where the first letter is designed? We saw some texts like that, looked cool but couldn't read a word, I thought I would be able to 'cause I can read phonetic transcript easily!:thumbs_up

Any mention of technology or current events will help to specify a date of writing. If you have a text in front of you that you think is 18th century, but then it mentions a television, that will obviously change your dating.

:thumbs_up

Those are just a few general tips. If you want to get specific, you'll need to read plenty of examples of writing from the different centuries. Here is a list of authors whose work can be said to be fairly representative of the writing of their times. Pick a period, and read a few pages from each of them. That should begin to give you a feel for how the language has changed over time. Don't try to do this all in one go - it will take time. Here's the list:

14th century:

Geoffrey Chaucer
John Gower
John Wycliffe
William Langland

15th century:

John Lydgate
Reginald Pecock
Thomas Malory
William Caxton

16th century:

Thomas More
Philip Sidney
Thomas Nashe
Raphael Holinshed
Edmund Spenser

I should of course mention William Shakespeare (1564-1616) at this point.

17th century:

Francis Bacon
John Donne
Robert Burton
Thomas Browne
Thomas Hobbes
John Milton
Andrew Marvell
John Dryden

18th century

Jonathan Swift
Samuel Johnson
Alexander Pope
Joseph Addison
Richard Steele
Daniel Defoe
Henry Fielding
Laurence Sterne
Edward Gibbon

The Romantics (roughly 1780-1830)

William Blake
William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Byron
Percy Shelley
John Keats
Mary Shelley

The Victorians (1837 onwards)

Thomas Carlyle
Charles Dickens
William Thackeray
Emily, Charlotte and Anne Brontë
Robert and Elizabeth Browning
George Eliot

20th century

Far too many to choose from in the age of mass-publishing, so here are just a few to look at:

Thomas Hardy
Joseph Conrad
Bertrand Russell
D. H. Lawrence
James Joyce
Virginia Woolf
George Orwell
Ernest Hemingway
Anthony Burgess

We're looking at the ones in bold and a few more, Jane Austin, Dr.Johnson (Might be the one I bolded), Kipling, Churchill x2, Rochester, Woah that's alot of reading...Ahh I need a break from Li *sigh*

The 20th century should be easier to spot than some of the others, of course.

:coolious:

Remember, your task is to get a feel for the writing of each period. Choose one period a week to immerse yourself in, and read a few pages from each of these writers each night. It's possible to find texts of much of their work online. There is also the library, of course. A few minutes a night, and you'd be able to get a very clear sense of what English looks like at different periods in history.

:coolious:

I'm not suggesting you have to go out and read every writer's complete works - you don't need to do that if all you want to do is get a feel for the language of their times.

:coolious:

However, there are lots of other reasons for reading their works. These are among the very greatest writers in English.

I hope this is helpful for you. Let me know what you think.

Peace

;D You sound exactly like my teacher.

Thank you & Peace.

 

[czgibson]

Edit: Double post.

 

[czgibson]

Greetings,

We're lookin' at Beowulf, I thinks it's recently been made into a film

It has been. Very good it was too, I thought.

:rollseyes Oh and the Battle of Maldon, forgot who it was by...

And so has everyone else! All we know is that he was a monk.

Cool, thank you for the link, we're looking at chaucers 'wife of Bath' which is dud to translate ZzZz I'm on line 333 and it goes up to 1237!! :exhausted If you could translate that for me I would be extremely grateful, no wait cheating is bad imsad VERY BAD!

Cheating is pointless.

Chaucer's English definitely is hard to get into, but it's so much easier than learning another language or anything like that. If you know English, you'll start to see connections and similarities all over the place. In fact, Chaucer is where modern English suddenly becomes much easier to recognise. Compare some of his writing with some Old English and you'll see what I mean.

The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale are some of the funniest and most human bits of writing ever produced. For pretty much the first time in English literature, here we have one of a group of real characters that you could imagine meeting. The Canterbury pilgrims are not just names on a page, or exaggerated heroes or villains with no possible basis in real life; they are people. And the Wife of Bath is definitely one of the most engaging.

Get into it - you'll love it.

Cool, but theres so many, we're looking at:

-Old English
-Middle English
-Renaissance
-Elizabethan
-Restoration
-Georgian
-Augustan
-Romantic
-Modern
-Post modern

So what dates go with each of these....Hmmm..

All of these are covered in my post. Plus, to be honest, this is the sort of information you could easily find by picking up any History of English Literature and looking at the contents page.

However, since I'm a nice guy (and, hooray, it's half-term), I'll help you out on this one - on the condition that you try to start finding things out for yourself a little more. Go into a library with any question in your head and don't leave till you've found the answer. The more you do it, the easier it becomes.

Here is a list of approximate dates:

Old English: pre-1066

Middle English: 1066-1510

Renaissance: 1510-1620

Elizabethan: 1558-1603 was Elizabeth's reign. Shakespeare's early works fall into this category. His later works are Jacobean (i.e. written during the reign of James I)

Restoration: 1660-1689

Augustan: 1700-1745

Georgian can refer to almost all of the 18th century. Britain was ruled by Georges from 1714 to 1830

Romantic: 1780-1830

Modern can mean a lot of things (e.g. Shakespeare's English is called 'Early Modern English') but in this context it could either mean "20th century onwards", or it could be referring specifically to the Modernists, a group of highly experimental artists, writers and thinkers working roughly during the period 1910-1930. The writers include people like Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, and, with my vote for first equal Greatest Writer Of All Time, James Joyce.

Apart from Muezzin, maybe.

Post-Modern can be thought of as roughly post-World War Two in terms of time, but as a specific genre of literature it arose somewhere in the 1950s or 60s.

Is that the one where the first letter is designed? We saw some texts like that, looked cool but couldn't read a word, I thought I would be able to 'cause I can read phonetic transcript easily!

I think you may be thinking of Medieval manuscripts like this one for example. Zoom in and have a look - you'll see loads of words you recognise.

What I mean by 18th century writers using capitals mid-sentence is this type of thing:

The Author giveth some Account of himself and Family: His first Inducements to travel. He is shipwreck'd, and swims for his Life: Gets safe on shoar in the Country of Lilliput: Is made a Prisoner, and carry'd up the Country.

Those are the opening word of Swift's Gulliver's Travels, a book that I would recommend to everyone. We all know that it's the book about the big man and the small people, but it's actually much, much better than that simple account of it sounds. If you only read ten English classics in your life, make this one of them.

We're looking at the ones in bold and a few more, Jane Austin, Dr.Johnson (Might be the one I bolded), Kipling, Churchill x2, Rochester,

All excellent wordsmiths, although for Churchill I assume you mean Winston C. and who else?

Rochester is someone who your teacher probably thought would sound exciting and prurient for you to enjoy. His writing can get a little on the racy side, as you may have discovered, but if you haven't, proceed with caution.

Woah that's alot of reading...Ahh I need a break from Li *sigh*

I know I've given you a big list of names, but don't look on it as a lot of reading. From the sound of things, to answer this part of your course you don't need to read any of the authors I've mentioned in their entirety, or any of their books all the way through.

Here's the secret thought behind those words:

You could probably read seven pages by twenty of them and pass with flying colours.

Think how easily you could do that. Seven pages a night. Three weeks. Job done.

However, I can assure you that if you use this method, something will grab your attention, or take you by surprise, and will spark your curiosity to invite you on a journey that you cannot have imagined. If you accept, you could discover much about what it means to be human, and how words can attempt to explain our being. You might also discover just how much the English language, or any language, can express about life, the universe and everything.

You sound exactly like my teacher.

I do my best.

Peace

 

[Pk_#2]

Greetings,

Haallo =)

It has been. Very good it was too, I thought.

:thumbs_up Haven't seen it, not a film typa girl..

And so has everyone else! All we know is that he was a monk.

Cool.

Cheating is pointless.

Agreed :thumbs_up

Chaucer's English definitely is hard to get into, but it's so much easier than learning another language or anything like that. If you know English, you'll start to see connections and similarities all over the place. In fact, Chaucer is where modern English suddenly becomes much easier to recognise. Compare some of his writing with some Old English and you'll see what I mean.

I printed off a dictionary of old words and things, so it's easier to translate their work now =)

The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale are some of the funniest and most human bits of writing ever produced. For pretty much the first time in English literature, here we have one of a group of real characters that you could imagine meeting. The Canterbury pilgrims are not just names on a page, or exaggerated heroes or villains with no possible basis in real life; they are people. And the Wife of Bath is definitely one of the most engaging.

Get into it - you'll love it.

:thumbs_up

However, since I'm a nice guy (and, hooray, it's half-term), I'll help you out on this one - on the condition that you try to start finding things out for yourself a little more.

Hooray!! Double Hoooray!! Thankoo sho much!

Here is a list of approximate dates:

Old English: pre-1066

Middle English: 1066-1510

Renaissance: 1510-1620

Elizabethan: 1558-1603 was Elizabeth's reign. Shakespeare's early works fall into this category. His later works are Jacobean (i.e. written during the reign of James I)

Restoration: 1660-1689

Augustan: 1700-1745

Georgian can refer to almost all of the 18th century. Britain was ruled by Georges from 1714 to 1830

Romantic: 1780-1830

Modern can mean a lot of things (e.g. Shakespeare's English is called 'Early Modern English') but in this context it could either mean "20th century onwards", or it could be referring specifically to the Modernists, a group of highly experimental artists, writers and thinkers working roughly during the period 1910-1930. The writers include people like Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, and, with my vote for first equal Greatest Writer Of All Time, James Joyce.

Apart from Muezzin, maybe.

Post-Modern can be thought of as roughly post-World War Two in terms of time, but as a specific genre of literature it arose somewhere in the 1950s or 60s.

:awesome:

All excellent wordsmiths, although for Churchill I assume you mean Winston C. and who else?

Yah he's wan, da ova wan I duno his first name,I'll ask him tomorrow!

Here's the secret thought behind those words:

You could probably read seven pages by twenty of them and pass with flying colours.

:coolious:

Peace

Peace & keep SHMILIN'!

You Mr, are super cool =D, I'll try not to bug you for a few days , enjoy yah half term bro!

Yes, my spellin is outrageous. :muddlehea

 

[buddy1]

NOW i know why i was so rubbish at english at school, its just a difficult being english and learning all the different ways of spelling and use of commas and apostrophys!!

its like spelling, i used to always struggle with the following words

Difficulty so when i was a kid i used to do, mrs d mrs i mrs f f i mrs c mrs u mrs lty!!

and Unecessary one Collar two Sleeves! (meaning there is one C and two S's!!)

to remember that after Q comes a U, i used to say The Queens Underpants!!

I still do it now!!!!

 

[Pk_#2]

and Unecessary one Collar two Sleeves! (meaning there is one C and two S's!!)

1 cup, two sugars,

You still spelt it incorrectly :X Necessary & Unnecessary. I fink :coolious:

 

[Re.TiReD]

lol ^ kool, I'll definately remember that now :-[

Quick question: Why is it that an English teacher has not capitalised the first letter of his name? :-[ I was just wondering....

 

[Güven]

Oh yah ma teacher said Frisians do exist :coolious: br.Guven is a Frisian he lives in the Netherlands and must be in his 90's by now...:thumbs_up

OMG how could i missed this , WHat Tha LOL ;D Im not frisian ! and 90's? Maybe in 70 years lol

 

[Pk_#2]

lol ^ kool, I'll definately remember that now :-[

Quick question: Why is it that an English teacher has not capitalised the first letter of his name? :-[ I was just wondering....

It's his initials cz and then Gibson what ever that is Lol, so entirely that's not his name really.

OMG how could i missed this , WHat Tha LOL ;D Im not frisian ! and 90's? Maybe in 70 years lol

Shush you Frisian Lol ;D


Alright hold up, lets not be mean to lil bro, you decide, German or Frisian?

 

[czgibson]

Greetings,

Quick question: Why is it that an English teacher has not capitalised the first letter of his name? :-[ I was just wondering....

What an excellent question!

It derives from my first email address, and for some reason it's never occurred to me to capitalise it.

Peace

 

[unknown_JJ]

Hey CzGibson,

That time of the year eh, packed with assignments .i need some help with word to word dependency diagrams, they r really confusing and i have an undergraduate dissertation to do on phonology, syntax is doin my head in grr.

Heres what i know; i know what all the word classes are, aprt from those that don't have any (suprasyntagmatic?) and i know, well i think i know what a pre adjunct is and a complement, i know what a parent and dependant word is but

how do i know where the subject and object of the sentence is, what is a sharer? what about co-ordination, how do i know which way the arrow goes?

I hope you understand, because i don't get it.

 

[czgibson]

Greetings,

Sorry for the late reply. I must have missed this one.

Hey CzGibson,

That time of the year eh, packed with assignments .i need some help with word to word dependency diagrams, they r really confusing and i have an undergraduate dissertation to do on phonology, syntax is doin my head in grr.

Heres what i know; i know what all the word classes are, aprt from those that don't have any (suprasyntagmatic?) and i know, well i think i know what a pre adjunct is and a complement, i know what a parent and dependant word is but

how do i know where the subject and object of the sentence is, what is a sharer? what about co-ordination, how do i know which way the arrow goes?

I hope you understand, because i don't get it.

Sorry, my friend, it sounds like you know more about this than me. Linguistics is not a specialist area for me.

I can tell you a bit about subject / object, though.

In simple terms, the subject of a sentence is the one that is doing something to the object.

[Subject in bold / Object in italics in the following examples.]

The cow ate the grass.

Subjects can be more abstract or complex than a cow, however:

The dialectical materialism of Karl Marx is the basis for Communism.

Sometimes subjects don't need an object:

The house was particularly ugly.



Is that any help?


Peace

 

[unknown_JJ]

Greetings,

Sorry for the late reply. I must have missed this one.



Sorry, my friend, it sounds like you know more about this than me. Linguistics is not a specialist area for me.

I can tell you a bit about subject / object, though.

In simple terms, the subject of a sentence is the one that is doing something to the object.

[Subject in bold / Object in italics in the following examples.]

The cow ate the grass.

Subjects can be more abstract or complex than a cow, however:

The dialectical materialism of Karl Marx is the basis for Communism.

Sometimes subjects don't need an object:

The house was particularly ugly.



Is that any help?


Peace

Dearest brother,

This was a very late reply imsad I've moved on to Keltoi now! *Bugs Kel*

I've handed in the assignment bro, I hope I done well..+o(

What did you teach then? Phonology?