Vocabulary and Sentence Structure 1 of 29 Vocabulary Development & Sentence Structure © Steve Whitmore May 2017
Vocabulary and Sentence Structure 1 of 29
Vocabulary Development
& Sentence Structure
© Steve Whitmore
May 2017
Vocabulary and Sentence Structure 2 of 29
Causes of Mortality Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.
Mexicans eat a lot of fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.
Chinese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.
Italians drink a lot of red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.
Germans drink a lot of beer and eat lots of sausages and fats and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.
CONCLUSION:
Eat and drink what you like. Speaking English is apparently what kills us.
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Learning Objectives
By the end of this module, you will understand how to
further develop your vocabulary and vary the sentence
structures you use.
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Some Facts about English
Difficult to define the exact number of words in English,
but the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) puts it at a bit
over 1 million:
• Standard language of literature and discourse
• Obsolete and archaic words
• Technical terms
• Slang and dialect
By number of speakers, English is the 2nd most
common 1st language in the world (Mandarin is #1,
Hindi/Hindustani is #3, and Spanish is #4)
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Some Facts about English
English has become the standard language of science,
flight, and diplomacy:
• Influence of British Empire in 18th and 19th centuries
• American influence through TV, radio, and the
internet in the 20th and 21st centuries
English is fluid:
• Quickly adopts new technical and popular words
• Steals words (along with the accompanying
linguistic structures) from many other languages
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Some Facts about English
Main sources for English vocabulary:
• French – 28%
• Latin – 28%
• Old and Middle English – 25%
• Greek – 5%
• Unknown – 4%
• Proper names – 3%
• Everywhere else – 7%
In other words, when you learn English, you learn several other languages as a “bonus.”
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Some Facts about English
Average literate person in Victorian era had a working
vocabulary of about 25,000 words
Currently, a native English speaker with a university
education is able to understand about 20,000 words
(not including technical vocabulary)
Minimum of 10,000 is necessary to score high on
TOEFL
English is the most widely learned 2nd language in the
world
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Expanding Your Vocabulary Effective vocabulary expansion requires work in 2 key
areas: idioms and general vocabulary (mainly verbs)
You can expand your facility with idioms by attending
to spoken English and informal written English
• Watch news programs on TV (CBC, Knowledge
Network, PBS)
• Watch educational programs on TV (Nova, Nature,
@discovery.ca)
• Practice speaking in English at every opportunity
• Read newspapers, newsfeeds, and magazines;
NB. (National Post – grade 12, Vancouver Sun –
grade 10, Vancouver Province – grade 8)
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Idioms are a Problem
That lecture was a real dog’s breakfast.
A good rule of thumb for paragraphs is that they
should not be longer than they are wide.
• Dog’s breakfast = a mess
• Rule of thumb = a rough approximation
Look them up in a dictionary of idioms
Ask what they mean
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Expanding General Vocabulary
Read novels that interest you:
• Slowest method, but most effective
• Requires spending time every week reading
• Use a dictionary when reading the books (Oxford
Advanced Learner's Dictionary is worth purchasing)
Try working on crosswords and tests found on the
internet (moderately effective)
30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary – least effective
(words that aren’t used tend not to transfer to memory)
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Expanding General Vocabulary
Use a good thesaurus when writing (The Synonym
Finder):
• Biggest help with verbs and adverbs (many common
verbs in English originate in Old English and are too
general – e.g., make, do, find, etc.)
• Use a dictionary to help sort out connotations; under
the word copy in a thesaurus you will find these
possibilities:
– duplicate, reproduce, caricature, parody,
emulate, parrot, cheat, plagiarize, model,
replicate, forge, counterfeit, mirror, etc.
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Varying Sentence Structure
Strings of sentences that are all the same in structure
(and length) become monotonous.
To avoid putting readers to sleep, try varying the
following:
• Sentence structure
• Sentence openers
• Sentence length
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Simple Sentences
Simple sentences consist of one independent clause
and any number of modifying words or phrases:
1. She banged the garbage can lids together.
2. At the same time, he slammed the kitchen cabinet
doors.
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Compound Sentences
Compound sentences consist of two or more
independent clauses joined by a coordinating
conjunction (and, but, or, for, nor, yet, so). They may
also have any number of modifying words and phrases:
1. He yanked the cookie sheets from the cabinet with
glee, and she rattled them enthusiastically.
2. She dropped the cookie sheets, but he picked them
up.
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Complex Sentences
Complex sentences have one independent clause, one
or more dependent clauses and sometimes modifying
words or phrases:
1. After the neighbors began to complain, the couple
started both their motorcycles and roared off.
2. They went in search of an authentic air raid siren, a
prize that they considered the ultimate in noisiness.
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Compound-Complex Sentences
Compound-complex sentences have two or more
independent clauses joined by a coordinating
conjunction and one or more dependent clauses:
1. When they were finally arrested for disturbing the
peace, the pair told the judge that they considered
noise-making a new art form, and the judge, banging
her gavel gleefully, said she’d always thought so
herself.
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Sentence Fragments
Sentence fragments are sentences that are grammatically incomplete because they either lack subjects and finite verbs or are made parts of larger structures by relative pronouns (who, which, that) or subordinating conjunctions (because, if, when, etc.).
1. Banging her gavel gleefully. (She was banging her gavel gleefully.)
2. I could tell she was happy. Because she was banging her gavel gleefully. (I could tell she was happy because she was banging her gavel gleefully.)
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Run-On Sentences Run-on sentences consist of two or more independent
clauses in a sentence which are not joined by a coordinating or subordinating conjunction, or by a semicolon (a comma splice consists of two or more independent clauses joined by a comma):
1. Three people celebrated the acquittal one of them was the judge. Three people celebrated the acquittal, and one of them was the judge. Or. Three people cele-brated the acquittal; one of them was the judge. Or. Although three people celebrated the acquittal, only one of them was a judge. Or. Three people celebrated the acquittal. One of them was the judge. But not. Three people celebrated the acquittal, one of them was the judge. (Comma splice)
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Noun Sentence Openers
That creature was a fish.
Dust storms marched incessantly across the wilderness.
Jane Doe is not her real name.
Note: The following slides have been adapted from an
adaptation of The Immense Journey: An Imaginative
Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man by Loren
Eiseley, 1946. The intermediate source is unknown.
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Pronoun Sentence Openers
He breathed the air for a few hours.
They were small things.
Some, like the giant redwoods, lingered on as relics;
many vanished entirely.
None of these insignificant creatures possessed any
remarkable talents.
Everyone watched the twisting plane.
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Adverb Sentence Openers
Finally, in the ruthless selection of the swamp margin, or in
the scramble for food in the tidal flats, the land becomes
home.
Always it marks the appearance of patterns of instinct and
the end of thought.
Perhaps the old road through the marsh could tell us.
Then a small button-shaped object upon the rug caught my
eye.
Nevertheless, if one had been seen stripped of its feathers, it
would still have seemed a slightly uncanny and unsightly
lizard.
Today we know that the abyss is haunted.
However, the females eventually subjugated the males.
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Prepositional Phrase Sentence Openers
At times, the slowly contracting circle of water left little windrows of minnows.
By day, the temperature in the world outside rose to a frightful intensity; at night the sun went down in smoking red.
For this reason, we tended to visualize all of our remote relatives as tree dwellers.
Before the rise of the tree rodents, the environment that they occupy had remained peculiarly open to exploitation.
In stagnant swamp waters, only a highly developed blood supply to the brain can prevent disaster.
On the oily surface of the pond, from time to time a snout thrust upward, took in air with a queer grunting inspiration, and swirled back to the bottom.
Of all the fishes, the mudskipper is perhaps the strangest.
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Dependent Clause Sentence Openers
When the sun rose next morning, the pond was an empty
place of cracked mud.
As I tapped and chiseled there in the foundation of the
world, I had ample time to consider the cunning
manipulability of the human hand.
If it does not get oxygen, life is gone.
Because the struggle for life is incessant, the unceasing
process promotes endless slow changes.
Although the traditional theory of evolution is usually
framed in terms that imply conflict, modern evolutionary
theories point out that cooperation as well as conflict is
required for survival.
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Coordinate Conjunction Openers
But in the mangrove swamps of the Niger, fish climb trees and ogle uneasy naturalists who try unsuccessfully to chase them back into the water.
And among those gasping, dying creatures, the Snout and his brethren survived.
Yet it was this poor specialization -- this bog-trapped failure -- whose descendants, in three great movements, were to dominate the earth.
Or consider its later wanderings.
Neither the birds nor the mammals, however, were quite what they seemed.
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Verbal Sentence Openers
Groping there in the dark cave, I began to feel detached
from the earth and all living creatures.
Equipped with beaks instead of with teeth, they pecked
the seeds and gobbled the insects.
To explain the rise of man through the slow incremental
gains of natural selection, Darwin had to assume a long
struggle of man with man and tribe with tribe.
Struck by the thought, I went out next day and collected
several others.
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Other Sentence Openers
Gray was the dawn. (Adjective)
That I enjoyed. (Object)
The things she accomplished, he envied. (Object)
There was nothing to hold the land in place. (Filler)
There are strange things still coming ashore. (Filler)
It is here that strange compromises are made. (Filler)
Discourse Analysis Exercises For four of the next five weeks, you will spend about half
the class completing team-based discourse analysis
exercises on the following topics:• May 29: Sentence and paragraph structure
• June 05: Punctuation, convention, and readability
• June 19: Stylistic flaws involving order and connection
• June 26: Stylistic flaws involving clarity and conciseness
Most materials will be supplied for the exercises.
It is helpful if one or two members of each team bring a
laptop (with a recent version of MS Word installed) to the
June 05 class to use the grammar checker.
Please ensure you attend these classes as absences will
reduce your participation grade.Vocabulary and Sentence Structure 27 of 29
ENSC 803 Teams
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Avneet [email protected]
Charanjot [email protected]
Hanene [email protected]
Jasmine [email protected]
Songhe [email protected]
Alejandro [email protected]
Lakshmi Narayana [email protected]
Muhammad Ali Amin [email protected]
Ronald [email protected]
Baraa [email protected]
Chinthaka [email protected]
Saeed [email protected]
Shweta [email protected]
Umme [email protected]
Farnoush [email protected]
Gurleen [email protected]
Hyomin [email protected]
Jingzhi [email protected]
Nimy [email protected]
These are the teams for the discourse analysis exercises in ENSC 803.
You can communicate within each e-mail list, but note that I do not receive any emails sent to the lists nor can the lists communicate.
I also recommend that you get to know your teammates as you may find it useful to work with each other proof-reading final drafts or rehearsing presentations.
Conclusion
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Reflections: How much time each week are willing to
spend to improve your vocabulary?
Reading: Strategies 72-94; Sentence Structure
Handout.