Tell us a fable

Monday, 6 June 2011

Some advice to improve your Writing

This article can be quite interesting and useful, because it offers some concise pieces of advice to improve your writing skills:

Ten Quick Tips to Improve Your Writing

By Richard Nordquist , About.com Guide

Whether we're composing a blog or a business letter, an email or an essay, our goal should be to respond clearly and directly to the needs and interests of our readers. These ten tips should help us to improve our writing whenever we set out to inform or persuade.

Lead with your main idea.
As a general rule, state the main idea of a paragraph in the first sentence--the topic sentence. Don't keep your readers guessing.
See Practice in Composing Topic Sentences.

Vary the length of your sentences.
In general, use short sentences to emphasize ideas. Use longer sentences to explain, define, or illustrate ideas.
See Sentence Variety.

Put key words and ideas at the beginning or end of a sentence.
Don't bury a main point in the middle of a long sentence. To emphasize key words, place them at the beginning or (better yet) at the end.
See Emphasis.

Vary sentence types and structures.
Vary sentence types by including occasional questions and commands. Vary sentence structures by blending simple, compound, and complex sentences.
See Basic Sentence Structures.

Use active verbs.
Don't overwork the passive voice or forms of the verb "to be." Instead, use active verbs in the active voice.
See F. Scott Fitzgerald's New York in the 1920s.

Use specific nouns and verbs.
To convey your message clearly and keep your readers engaged, use concrete and specific words that show what you mean.
See Detail and Descriptive Details in Wallace Stegner's "Town Dump."

Cut the clutter.
When revising your work, eliminate unnecessary words.
See Practice in Cutting the Clutter.

Read aloud when you revise.
When revising, you may hear problems (of tone, emphasis, word choice, and syntax) that you can't see. So listen up!
See On Reading Aloud.

Actively edit and proofread.
It's easy to overlook errors when merely looking over your work. So be on the lookout for common trouble spots when studying your final draft.
See Revision Checklist and Editing Checklist.

Use a dictionary.
When proofreading, don't trust your spellchecker: it can tell you only if a word is a word, not if it's the right word.
See Commonly Confused Words and Fifteen Common Errors.

We'll close with a cautionary note borrowed from George Orwell's Rules for Writers: "Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous."

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Moreover, as we have seen in class, connectors play a very important role in all English compositions. Here you have a list of the most used: http://www.gvsu.edu/mll/swc/index.cfm?id=E9B350B1-C125-2570-C1962F0CF801B307

Aesop's biography

How much do you know about Aesop? Where was he born? When did he live? The answers to these and some other questions are in this biography:

Aesop Biography

Aesop, or Æsop (from the Greek Aisopos), famous for his Fables, is supposed to have lived from about 620 to 560 B.C. Aesop's Fables are still taught as moral lessons and used as subjects for various entertainments especially children's plays and cartoons.

The place of his birth is uncertain--Thrace, Phrygia, Aethiopia, Samos, Athens and Sardis all claiming the honour. We possess little trustworthy information concerning his life, except that he was the slave of Iadmon of Samos and met with a violent death at the hands of the inhabitants of Delphi. A pestilence that ensued being attributed to this crime, the Delphians declared their willingness to make compensation, which, in default of a nearer connexion, was claimed and received by Iadmon, the grandson of his old master. Herodotus, who is our authority for this (ii. 134), does not state the cause of his death; various reasons are assigned by later writers--his insulting sarcasms, the embezzlement of money entrusted to him by Croesus for distribution at Delphi, the theft of a silver cup.

Aesop must have received his freedom from Iadmon, or he could not have conducted the public defence of a certain Samian demagogue (Aristotle, Rhetoric, ii. 20). According to the story, he subsequently lived at the court of Croesus, where he met Solon, and dined in the company of the Seven Sages of Greece with Periander at Corinth. During the reign of Peisistratus he is said to have visited Athens, on which occasion he related the fable of The Frogs asking for a King, to dissuade the citizens from attempting to exchange Peisistratus for another ruler.

The popular stories current regarding him are derived from a life, or rather romance, prefixed to a book of fables, purporting to be his, collected by Maximus Planudes, a monk of the 14th century. In this he is described as a monster of ugliness and deformity, as he is also represented in a well-known marble figure in the Villa Albani at Rome. That this life, however, was in existence a century before Planudes, appears from a 13th-century manuscript of it found at Florence. In Plutarch's Symposium of the Seven Sages, at which Aesop is a guest, there are many jests on his original servile condition, but nothing derogatory is said about his personal appearance. We are further told that the Athenians erected in his honour a noble statue by the famous sculptor Lysippus, which furnishes a strong argument against the fiction of his deformity. Lastly, the obscurity in which the history of Aesop is involved has induced some scholars to deny his existence altogether.

It is probable that Aesop did not commit his fables to writing; Aristophanes (Wasps, 1259) represents Philocleon as having learnt the "absurdities" of Aesop from conversation at banquets) and Socrates whiles away his time in prison by turning some of Aesop's fables "which he knew" into verse (Plato, Phaedo, 61 b). Demetrius of Phalerum (345-283 B.C.) made a collection in ten books, probably in prose (Lopson Aisopeion sunagogai) for the use of orators, which has been lost. Next appeared an edition in elegiac verse, often cited by Suidas, but the author's name is unknown. Babrius, according to Crusius, a Roman and tutor to the son of Alexander Severus, turned the fables into choliambics in the earlier part of the 3rd century A.D. The most celebrated of the Latin adapters is Phaedrus, a freedman of Augustus. Avianus (of uncertain date, perhaps the 4th century) translated 42 of the fables into Latin elegiacs.

The collections which we possess under the name of Aesop's Fables are late renderings of Babrius's Version or Progumnasmata, rhetorical exercises of varying age and merit. Syntipas translated Babrius into Syriac, and Andreopulos put the Syriac back again into Greek. Ignatius Diaconus, in the 9th century, made a version of 55 fables in choliambic tetrameters. Stories from Oriental sources were added, and from these collections Maximus Planudes made and edited the collection which has come down to us under the name of Aesop, and from which the popular fables of modern Europe have been derived.

In the early 1200s some of Aesop's tales were adapted for use in the European Jewish community by Berechiah ha-Nakdan, a Jewish exegete, ethical writer, grammarian, and translator; his name means "Berechiah the Puntuator (or grammarian)", indicating his possible profession. Today he is best known for his Hebrew work, Mishlei Shualim, which appears to be derived from a collection of Aesop's fables, from the French writer Ysopet of Marie de France (c.1170). Berechiah's work adds a layer of Biblical quotations and allusions in the tales, adapting them as a way to teach Jewish ethics.

Before any Greek text appeared, a Latin translation of 100 Fabulae Aesopicae by an Italian scholar named Ranuzio (Renutius) was published at Rome, 1476. About 1480 the collection of Planudes was brought out at Milan by Buono Accorso (Accursius), together with Ranuzio's translation. This edition, which contained 144 fables, was frequently reprinted and additions made from time to time from various manuscripts.--the Heidelberg (Palatine), Florentine, Vatican and Augsburg---by Stephanus (1547), Nevelet (1610), Hudson (1718), Hauptmann (1741), Furia (1810), Coray (1810), Schneider (1812) and others. A critical edition of all the previously known fables, prepared by Carl von Halm from the collections of Furia, Coray and Schneider, was published in the Teubner series of Greek and Latin texts. A Fabularum Aesopicarum sylloge (233 in number) from a Paris manuscript, with critical notes by Sternbach, appeared in a Cracow University publication, Rozprawy akademii umiejetinosci (1894).
[From: http://www.biographybase.com/biography/Aesop.html]

New version of the Tortoise and the Hare fable

Dear students, do you remember the Tortoise and the Hare fable that we read in class the other day? Well, what could have happened if the hare won the race? Imagine... I have just seen a very funny presentation which deals about this topic. I hope you enjoy it!!

New Version of Tortoise and Hare story

View more presentations from Dhananjay Parkhe जय् पारखे धनंजय

Puzzles

There is time for evertyhing, so now, let's play some games I have created for you:

- A crossword with vocabulary of the unit: http://www.proprofs.com/games/crossword/fable-crossword/

- A wordsearch about animals: http://www.proprofs.com/games/word-search/animals-103/

- A cloze test about the fable The Shepherd's Boy and the Wolf (you need to write the password "password"): http://uk3.hotpotatoes.net/ex/71883/BVTVFWYB.php

- A crossword about animals in the Chester Zoo: http://uk3.hotpotatoes.net/ex/71883/JJIIHUOD.php (you have also to write the password "password" and you may find useful Chester Zoo's website: http://www.chesterzoo.org/animals)

Sunday, 5 June 2011

Treasure Hunt

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In this session, we are going to work with computers. I have prepared a Treasure Hunt, a very funny activity in which you have to find the answers to several questions. You can consult the page by clicking in this link: http://poster.4teachers.org/worksheet/view.php?id=156242

Please, follow the instructions carefully! Remember that you have to answer all the questions and write the final task on a separate piece of paper and give it to me at the end of the class. If you finish before, you can do some Extension or Reinforcement activities, or play some of the games I have prepared for you (click on Labels, at the right side of this blog). Good luck and enjoy the visit to the zoos!

Friday, 3 June 2011

Listening: Fables

I have discovered a wonderful website in which you can practice your listening skills. If you click on http://clubefl.gr/blog/aesop/, you will have access to several audio files about fables. You can listen to them as many times as you want, and pay attention to the pronunciation. Furthermore, you can look the script of these short stories. If you want to improve your listening skill, please click on "Listening quiz", at the end of each fable. I hope you enjoy it!