The study of how rhetorical devices affect language comprises the essence of how English teachers teach students to analyze literature.  Tropes (figures of speech) and Schemes (language structures) make up the core of this study in any secondary or post-secondary classroom.  This intensive 10-week study, offered as an immediate download,  will prepare your students for analyzing the most common and important language devices used by writers and speakers.  It covers not only what the devices are but how they affect meaning.  This unit also contains daily overhead blocks for each day of a 10-week cycle, complete with quizzes and exams for summative and cumulative grading.  View Samples (right-click and save).  Great for regular or AP students!

Devices covered include verbal irony, dramatic irony, situation irony, ambiguity, simile, metaphor, imagery, symbolism, onomatopoeia, personification, apostrophe, allusion, oxymoron, paradox, pun, erotema, conceit, hyperbole, understatement, tone, metonymy, synecdoche, anthimeria, meiosis, auxesis, anastrophe, parallelism, climax, antithesis, stichomythia, anaphora, epistrophe, asyndeton, polysyndeton, parenthesis, apposition, periphrasis, assonance, consonance, epanalepsis, ellipsis, anadiplosis, antimetabole, and polyptoton.

This unit of materials for duplication contains daily "sponge activities" on punctuation and usage with quizzes, tests, handouts, and notes for the classroom included.  This unit covers the key areas of language use and punctuation in which junior high and high school students are typically weak.  This unit contains over 65 pages of materials centered around a 14-week structure of five-minute beginning-of-class daily overhead  assignments (five-minute warm-ups). View samples from the unit (right-click and save).

Concepts covered include punctuating titles, quoting with accuracy, apostrophes, subject-verb agreement, pronoun agreement, case, modifiers, parallelism, person shifts, prepositions, infinitives, phrases vs. clauses, sentences vs. fragments, sentence types, and identifying sentence structure errors.

Research-based approach to teaching 96 SAT vocabulary words in 5-minute drills within six weeks.  Comes with quizzes, exams, and keys.  The approach is structuralist in nature, surrounds the concept that word meanings hinge upon their opposites.  (After all, what is "up" without "down"?)  Thus, each week four meanings (two sets of two opposites) are matched to 16 words (four words per day) with a quiz at the end of each week.

A complete unit on logic and diagramming arguments.  This unit includes more than 75 pages of notes for the overhead, daily warm-ups (36 weeks), practice exercises, quizzes, exams, and keys on testing arguments for validity.  Teach your students (any students) how to easily dissect an argument as enrichment or as part of practically any state language arts objective.  You also get the Fallacies Sponge free with your purchase. (see below).  View samples from the unit
(right-click and save).

Concepts covered include syllogisms, premises, conclusions, Venn, Euler, truth vs. validity, arguments: types A-D, diagramming a premise, and checking a diagram for validity.  Included are tons of notes, examples and practice with both Venn and Eulerian (Johnston) diagrams.  Also includes keys for every exercise.

14 Pages of 5-minute drills, quizzes and tests, teaching over 20 common logical fallacies.  Great for any class where language precision and idea expression are stressed.  Made to supplement the Daily Logic Infusion unit.

Concepts covered include guilt by association, false dilemma, tu quoque, slippery slope, argument from ignorance, bandwagon, ad populum, argument from normality, post hoc, false appeal to authority, red herring, straw man, ad hominem, complex question, fantasy projection, biased sample, relativist fallacy, hasty generalization, faulty analogy, stolen concept, null value, barking cat, ambiguous collective, gambler's fallacy, spotlight fallacy, suppression of the agent, appeal to motivation, appeal to tradition, middle ground, and circular reasoning,

Free with your purchase of the Daily Logic Infusion unit (above)

This five-week unit contains 5-minute drills, quizzes and tests, teaching 28 concepts related to drama, including plot and conflict.

Concepts covered include soliloquy, aside, dialogue, setting, comedy, comic relief, subplot, tragic flaw, tragedy, reversal, recognition, tragic hero, dramatis personae, foreshadowing, catharsis, pathos, conflict, protagonist, antagonist, foil, antihero, chorus, plot, inciting event, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution.

You will need Acrobat Reader (free download) to view and print these files.  It is recommended that you save any of the above files by right-clicking an above icon, selecting "save target as" and saving to a location on your computer--rather than just clicking the link and waiting for the whole pdf file to load.