English Language Essentials

Cheatsheet Content

Writing a Recount To retell an experience or an event that happened in the past. The purpose of a recount can be to inform, entertain, reflect, or evaluate. 1. Chronological order of events 2. Past tense 3. First person 'I' or third person 'he, she, it, they' 4. Amazing adjectives to help create a picture in the reader's head 5. Powerful verbs to describe the action in the story 6. Conjunctions and connectives, such as 'a few minutes later', 'meanwhile', and 'afterwards' 7. Personal comments, opinions or interpretations of the writer 8. Reported speech and quoted speech Organization Introduction: Set the scene by telling the audience 'When', 'Where', 'Who', 'How' and 'Why'. Sequence of Events: Use a lot of details to tell the audience the sequence of events that took place. Conclusion: Add your own comment about the event. Tell your audience what happened in the end! Research Skills What is research? Well, it's when you copy facts from books and websites and put them all together. Right? Well, not exactly! Research is a learning and sharing process. Let's check out the process: EXPLORE: Explore the topic, define the subject, think about what you already know, brainstorm specific research questions related to the 'who', 'what', 'where', 'how', 'when' and 'why' of the topic. GATHER: Gather tools for the research. For example, refer to books, the Internet, magazines, dictionaries and newspapers. Photocopy materials, create graphic organisers, mark/print pages from the Internet and make written notes. CREATE: Verify the information. Organise the information and put it in order. Create something new using the notes and materials you have. Put in your own words and record sources in bibliography. SHARE: Share what you have created in a novel manner. Reflect about the entire process by answering the following questions: What were the easiest and the hardest parts? When did you learn the most? Did your final draft answer all the questions? What will you do differently next time? Searching the Internet It might be daunting to find information on the Internet because of its size. But it's really not that difficult. All you need to do is request a search for you from one of the several search engines. Given below is a plan on how to use search engines. 1. Keywords You must be able to select the best keyword combination for search engines because search engines do not read sentences as people do. Instead, they look for keywords in your query on the websites they search. The majority of search engines perform best when you provide them with a variety of keywords. So, how do you choose the most effective keywords? Think about what you want to search for and determine the relevant keywords. For 'blueberry muffin recipe' in the search for a recipe for a blueberry muffin, you can write 'blueberry muffin recipe', 'blueberry muffin recipe eggless', 'in the search bar. It doesn't matter what sequence the words are in. 2. Booleans You may narrow your search by using Boolean operators. You can use 'and', 'or' and a combination of the two conjunctions to make your request more specific. 3. Use to Require Words: When a search term is followed by a plus sign (+), some search engines make sure that the word appears in every document they return. Search example: Paris + Travel. 4. Use to Exclude Words: When we enter the minus sign (-) before a search term, some search engines ensure that none of the documents returned contain the word. Search example: Innova-car-automobile. Know Your Words unanimously adverb: with the agreement of all people involved unwittingly adverb: unintentionally suspended verb: hang (something) from somewhere tawny adjective: of an orange-brown or yellowish-brown colour muzzle noun: the projecting part of the face, including the nose and the mouth, of an animal such as a dog or a horse slumbers verb: sleeps sash noun: the framework of a window that holds the glass scurried verb: move hurriedly with short quick steps blancmange noun: a sweet opaque gelatinous dessert made with flavoured corn flour and milk sleight-of-mouth: Named after sleight-of-hand magic tricks, where you get the observer to look one way while you do something outside their field of vision, thereby making it appear to them as magic. Here, it is being referred to as sleight-of-'mouth' since the little boy was gobbling both 'a piece of cake' and an 'ice cream' while trying not to be noticed.