A slim but highly effective guide for teaching the convoluted spellings of English words.
An author offers a manual for instructors and parents on the best ways to teach students to navigate English spelling.
“Spelling is the unloved stepchild of the English language,” writes Fulford (The Complete Guide to English Spelling Rules, 2012, etc.) in the preface to this spelling guide. “Students hate to study it, teachers are frustrated when they teach it.” With this volume, the author attempts to make the subject a little less of a slog by building his text around the spelling rules that underlie most (though not all) words in the English language. Fulford believes that students learn better when they are offered the how and why of things rather than being forced to accept them without question. These spelling rules provide the how and why of “the various sounds of E,” the QU (plus vowel) combo, and the so-called “Annoying Spellings,” with topics like “Silent First Letters,” “The GH Words,” and “Confusing Homophones.” After a quick but thorough introductory section outlining the history of spelling and how he came to his methods, the author delivers chapters on each of the sounds that compose English words. The chapters present the rule (or rules) relevant to that sound followed by several long lists of spelling words that feature it. For “Combinations Using C,” for example, there are lists for when CH sounds like CH, like K, and like SH. The author occasionally supplies helpful notes to teachers on the difficulty of the concepts and at what stage of the learning process they should be introduced. Fulford writes in calm, practiced prose that communicates his ideas with clarity. His organization system greatly simplifies spelling, making it seem like something anyone could teach without much trouble. The book feels comprehensive at only 123 pages (and most of that just lists of words). Even highly literate readers should find useful rules that they never knew existed (such as how to predict whether a word ends in ABLE or IBLE). Fulford’s goal is to demystify spelling so that it feels less intimidating to both teachers and students, and on that count he has surely succeeded.
A slim but highly effective guide for teaching the convoluted spellings of English words.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9963799-2-2
Page Count: 123
Publisher: Astoria Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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