Mister James Teaches English

Broad Topic Sentences Active and Passive Voice Active voice means that a sentence has a subject that acts upon its verb. Passive voice means that a subject is a recipient of a verb’s action. You may have learned that the passive voice is weak and incorrect, but it isn’t that simple. When used correctly and in moderation, the passive voice is fine. In English grammar, verbs have five properties: voice, mood, tense, person, and number; here, we are concerned with voice. The two grammatical voices are active and passive. Active voice When the subject of a sentence performs the verb’s action, we say that the sentence is in the active voice. Sentences in the active voice have a strong, direct, and clear tone. Here are some short and straightforward examples of active voice. Active voice examples Monkeys adore bananas. The cashier counted the money. The dog chased the squirrel. All three sentences have a basic active voice construction: subject, verb, and object. The subject monkey performs

 On 31st October it is Halloween.  In ancient times, the holiday was marked by customs started by pagans. Pagans believed in many gods rather than a single god. It was believed that on the last night of October, the spirits of the dead roamed the Earth.  The holiday is also called All Hallows’ Eve. In the Christian church, All Hallows’ Eve is the night before All Saints’ Day. On November 1, All Saints’ Day honors all of the Christian saints. Gradually, Halloween became a nonreligious celebration. It is a time when people dress up in costumes, go trick-or-treating, and carve jack-o’-lanterns from hollowed out pumpkins. Ghosts and witches are popular costumes of the children who go from house to house saying, “Trick-or-treat!” The treat is usually candy. The origins of Halloween date back to several ancient festivals held in the autumn. The Swedish Allahelgona  or Alla helgons dag is at the 1st November. It was erased from the calender in 1700s but it was reinstated in 1953 again. Since

We are moving on now in the Gymnasium Modersmål course to writing, but that always of course includes reading. Here is a list of just a very few of the major authors and poets from the four eras of modern literature we discussed in the first three lectures. Feel free to browse through the list and choose any one you find interesting. We can do more work on them in the second half of this term. Romantic Era William Blake   (Blake was the artist, writer and poet that ushered in romanticism) George Gordon, Lord Byron   (a long biography and then some of his poetry) Samuel Taylor Coleridge   (a long biography and then some of his writing) Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley   Percy Bysshe Shelley   William Wordsworth  John Keats Walter Scott Jane Austen   (Not a Romantic writer, but a phenomenon that cannot be ignored. Austen is enigma that is actually difficult to place in literary history as she invented a genre and her work remains very popular today).   Victorian Era Charles Dickens Sir Richa

"Araby" is a short story by James Joyce  (PDF) published in his 1914 collection Dubliners. On the purely narrative level the story traces a young boy's infatuation with his friend's sister. On the symbolic level Araby traces the development of the boy as he turns his back on the certainties of childhood and Catholicism and embraces the uncertainties of adult emotions and desires via imagination. Araby is structured in a way that first introduces the childhood world of the narrator, the boy of the story. It is a mysterious but exciting world where even simple things take on great significance, relative to the small size of the world - a single street really. But the story also opens with death, and the abandoned house of the recently deceased, but 'charitable' priest. This death can be understood as the loss of faith and the end of childhood. From there we look forward as readers through what is possibly the first steps into the adult world by the boy telli

This is a short summary of some of the major currents in English Literature since 1965. The difficulty in making such a summary is that the language rather than nationality has now become the main identifier for the creative use of English. But the language itself has become more varied. Take this passage from the 2020 book Shuggie Bann by queer Scottish/American author Douglas Stuart: “Ah have been lonely fur years now. Lonely long afore ma wife died. Don't get us wrong. She was a guid wummin, a guid wummin just like our Colleen, but we were jist stuck in our wee routine. When ye think about it, ah've been under the ground most of ma life. There wasn't much in me for sharing at the end of a day. After twenty years, what do you talk about? But she was a guid wummin. She used to make me these big hot dinners, with meat and gravy, the plate scalding hot cos she'd warm it up all day in the oven. We ate big hot dinners because we had nothing left to say. Nothing worthwhile