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Alphabiography
An alphabiography is an autobiography, often set as an English studies project for high school or college students, consisting of a set of twenty-six short stories or chapters about the writer's life. Each story or chapter has a title starting with a different letter of the alphabet, for example: ''"Apple growing"'', ''"Baseball"'', ''"Cynthia"'' etc. At the end a summation is undertaken. Examples The book ''Totally Joe'' by James Howe is about Joe Bunch, who is given an assignment to write his alphabiography – although he thinks it will be boring, it turns out to be the gateway for him to learn much about his own identity as a gay young adult. ReadWriteThink.org, a website sponsored by thNational Council of Teachers of Englishand thInternational Reading Association includes for an alphabiography project. See also * Abecedarius An abecedarius (also abecedary and abecedarian) is a special type of acrostic in which the first letter of every word, strophe or verse follows t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Autobiography
An autobiography, sometimes informally called an autobio, is a self-written account of one's own life. It is a form of biography. Definition The word "autobiography" was first used deprecatingly by William Taylor in 1797 in the English periodical ''The Monthly Review'', when he suggested the word as a hybrid, but condemned it as "pedantic". However, its next recorded use was in its present sense, by Robert Southey in 1809. Despite only being named early in the nineteenth century, first-person autobiographical writing originates in antiquity. Roy Pascal differentiates autobiography from the periodic self-reflective mode of journal or diary writing by noting that " utobiographyis a review of a life from a particular moment in time, while the diary, however reflective it may be, moves through a series of moments in time". Autobiography thus takes stock of the autobiographer's life from the moment of composition. While biographers generally rely on a wide variety of documents ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
English Studies
English studies (usually called simply English) is an academic discipline taught in primary, secondary, and post-secondary education in English-speaking countries; it is not to be confused with English taught as a foreign language, which is a distinct discipline. An expert on English studies can be called an Anglicist. The discipline involves the study and exploration of texts created in English literature. English studies include: the study of literature (especially novels, plays, short stories, and poetry), the majority of which comes from Britain, the United States, and Ireland (although English-language literature from any country may be studied, and local or national literature is usually emphasized in any given country); English composition, including writing essays, short stories, and poetry; English language arts, including the study of grammar, usage, and style; and English sociolinguistics, including discourse analysis of written and spoken texts in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Short Story
A short story is a piece of prose fiction that typically can be read in one sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a single effect or mood. The short story is one of the oldest types of literature and has existed in the form of legends, Myth, mythic tales, Folklore genre, folk tales, fairy tales, tall tales, fables and anecdotes in various ancient communities around the world. The modern short story developed in the early 19th century. Definition The short story is a crafted form in its own right. Short stories make use of plot, resonance, and other dynamic components as in a novel, but typically to a lesser degree. While the short story is largely distinct from the novel or novella, novella/short novel, authors generally draw from a common pool of literary techniques. The short story is sometimes referred to as a genre. Determining what exactly defines a short story has been recurrently problematic. A classic de ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chapter (books)
A chapter (c''apitula'' in Latin; ''sommaires'' in French) is any of the main thematic divisions within a writing of relative length, such as a book of prose, poetry, or law. A chapter book may have multiple chapters that respectively comprise discrete topics or themes. In each case, chapters can be numbered, titled, or both. An example of a chapter that has become well known is "Down the Rabbit-Hole", which is the first chapter from ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland''. History of chapter titles Many ancient books had neither word divisions nor chapter divisions. In ancient Greek texts, some manuscripts began to add summaries and make them into tables of contents with numbers, but the titles did not appear in the text, only their numbers. Some time in the fifth century CE, the practice of dividing books into chapters began. Jerome (d. 420) is said to use the term ''capitulum'' to refer to numbered chapter headings and ''index capitulorum'' to refer to tables of contents. Augu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alphabet
An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllable, and logographic systems use characters to represent words, morphemes, or other semantic units. The first fully phonemic script, the Proto-Sinaitic script, later known as the Phoenician alphabet, is considered to be the first alphabet and is the ancestor of most modern alphabets, including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and possibly Brahmic. It was created by Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in the Sinai Peninsula (as the Proto-Sinaitic script), by selecting a small number of hieroglyphs commonly seen in their Egyptian surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values of the Canaanite languages. However, Peter T. Daniels distinguishes an abugida, a set of graphemes that represent cons ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Howe
James Howe (born August 2, 1946) is an American children's writer who has written more than 79 juvenile and young adult fiction books. He is best known for the Bunnicula series about a vampire rabbit that sucks the juice out of vegetables. Biography Howe was born in Oneida, New York. At the age of nine or ten, Howe wrote a play based on the " Blondie" comic strip as well as a variety of short stories and self-published newspapers. Of the latter his favorite is ''The Gory Gazette'' which he made for a self-founded club, Vampire Legion. Howe continued to write plays during his theater studies at Boston University, and eventually moved to New York City to pursue a career as an actor and model while directing plays and working as a literary agent. In the mid-1970s, Howe's mother-in-law encouraged him and his wife, Deborah Howe, to create a children's story based on a character the two had created while watching older Dracula movies, which at the time were played late at night o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Abecedarius
An abecedarius (also abecedary and abecedarian) is a special type of acrostic in which the first letter of every word, strophe or verse follows the order of the letters in the alphabet. Etymology "Abecedarius" (or "abecedarium") is a Medieval Latin word meaning "ABC primer", derived by adding the suffix "-arius" (-a, -um) to the names of the first four letters of the alphabet (a+b+c+d). According to the OED, the earliest use of its English cognate, "abecedary", dates back at least to the mid-15th century, preceding the first usage of "abecedarian" which, as an adjective meaning "arranged in alphabetical order", can be first attested in 1665. The related adjective "alphabetic" (from Ancient Greek) has been used interchangeably with "abecedarian" since at least the 17th century. Origins The abecedarius is most probably the oldest type of acrostic. Its origins have been linked to either the sacred nature of letters and the mystical significance of these types of arrangements or it ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
