Group items tagged

"Ever wonder why you can't figure out when and where to stick a comma? It's probably because commas, by far, have more rules and applications than any other punctuation mark. But why do so many people use the semicolon incorrectly? Comparatively, it should be one of the easiest punctuation marks to master. And why doesn't anybody seem to use the en dash?"

"When I was a freshman at Central Connecticut State University I had a professor say to me, "you throw around punctuation like it's confetti." There are days when that statement is still true. One of those pieces of confetti punctuation that troubled me then and troubles me now is the semicolon. I know that I am not the only person who has been tripped up by the semicolon. A new TED-Ed lesson, How to Use a Semicolon, was made for people just like me. "

Click on the guide to find out how each punctuation symbol is correctly used.

"Paste your text into Analyze My Writing and it will generate a ton of information about your writing. Analyze My Writing will give you a break-down of the readability of your writing on five indices. The analysis will include listings of the most common words and most common word pairs in your writing. A listing of how frequently you use punctuation and punctuation types is included in the analysis provided by Analyze My Writing. Finally, a word cloud is included at the end of the analysis of your writing. "

"I just learned through Learning in Hand that the iPad app Sentence Builder is now free for a limited period of time (used to cost $4,99). Sentence Builder is an app that provides language practice for young learners. It basically helps them learn about words, pronunciation, grammar and punctuation."

"On any given day at Holy Trinity Episcopal Academy, visitors to the Lower School library might be surprised to find it bears little resemblance to the school libraries of years past. Several 5th graders sit at computers, developing 3D luggage tags using Tinkercad to be printed on the nearby Makerbot 3D printer. On the central library tables, students are creating Rube Goldberg machines using physical manipulatives or the RubeWorks iPad app. The library is a buzz of activity and student engagement, punctuated with squeals of excitement. And overseeing the makerspace is librarian Judy Houser, a veteran educator who took the visionary step of transforming this once quiet library into a space where students not only learn to love reading, but learn to explore, create and innovate using a variety of tools"

"One way to promote engagement and learning is to consciously create pauses throughout the day. We can create a sense of spaciousness in our classroom by slowing down the pace of our speech and punctuating our lessons with silence. Introduced well, this practice can improve classroom discourse."

"Most of us know you should read something out loud when proofreading, but we may miss critical errors. We insert words we think are there, but aren't, because we wrote it. Using the text-to-speech function on your device will help prevent your internal autocorrect from missing errors. Over at TUAW, they suggest using the Mac's and iOS's built-in text to speech function. Windows, Android and Chrome have text-to-speech too, though, so this tip works anywhere. You'll hear words that are missing and punctuation that's off when the text doesn't sound right. It's no replacement for a human, but can help in a pinch."

"When Ernest Hemingway would stand at his desk, he had a funny habit as he wrote: when he was working on the tough bits he'd write in his boyish, punctuation-disregarding longhand. Once the juice started to flow, he'd switch to the typewriter. Hemingway was moving between unmediated and mediated work: the pencil to his page was unmediated, the typewriter mediated. The analog helped to find flow, the mediated helped find efficiency. As Clive Thompson, the author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better, would argue, working in analog or mediated ways changes how our brains and thoughts behave: anyone who's ever received a serendipitous answer from someone on Twitter has experienced how technology can amplify our social thinking, while at the same time if you've put off your projects because you're fiddling on Facebook, you know much tech can distract us--to the point of changing the structure of our brains."

"Do your students struggle with writing COMPLETE SENTENCES that make sense when read aloud?  How about using CAPITAL LETTERS to begin their sentences and PUNCTUATION MARKS to end their sentences?  Sometimes I feel like a broken record when it comes to these writing requirements in my classroom! My second graders are required to write a biography as one of their writing projects during the year and I knew that I wanted something to motivate them to do these skills without being that broken record when they show me their work.  I think I found the PERFECT MOTIVATOR...QR CODES! "

"A year ago, Nick Anglin was a jaded 6th grader who, as he put it, "hated school and rarely paid attention or did homework." He punctuated the hours of boredom by cracking jokes and making his classmates laugh. Then, something extraordinary happened. Anglin went to a summer Maker Corps camp at the Sutherland Middle School in Charlottesville, Virginia, where his teachers Robert Munsey and Eric Bredder encouraged him to follow his curiosity and passion. As Anglin recently recalled, "They challenged us from day one: 'Create a project related to something you love, incorporate some type of technology and possibly start a business around it.'""

"The Writer's Workshop is a playlist of twenty-two TED-Ed lessons. The The Writer's Workshop contains lessons on basic topics like how to use punctuation and videos on more complex topics like how to make your writing humorous."

1- Definite and indefinte article 2- All about Adjectives 3- Punctuation 4- Passive Voice 5-When to use e.g and i.e