Plenty of high-schoolers preparing for the SAT have gotten this piece of advice: Put down your iPod and pick up a study guide.
The first part of that suggestion can now be scrapped. Kaplan Inc., a test-preparation service, has released a set of SAT practice quizzes for video iPods, The New York Times reports.
Kaplan has created three programs — for the test's mathematics, reading, and writing sections — and is selling them for $4.99 each at Apple's iTunes music store. The SAT-prep software joins programs like Tetris and Texas Hold 'Em in the online store's smallish "games" section.
Company officials call the iPod games "supplemental" services and say Kaplan is not about to depart from its traditional tutoring programs. –Brock Read
11 Responses to SAT Study Guides Reach the iPod
Dr_Decay - April 24, 2012 at 5:13 am
Yes! Small anecdote: In school, well meaning and intelligent English teachers made us write about the literature we were reading. I realized it was an important exercise, but, although I liked the reading, I just didn’t want to write about literature. And so my writing at school was at best workmanlike and at worst – I don’t want to remember. Later, there came subjects I wanted to – needed to write about (I am a scientist), and I began to care not just about what I said, but how I said it. I even started hanging out around language and writing blogs. I don’t know how well I write: in my line of work the feedback is almost exclusively about content and not form. But those articles in which the form really seemed to further the content are the ones I reflect on with the most satisfaction.
jffoster - April 24, 2012 at 11:19 am
“The note C# means nothing; the word jelly bean means something.”
What do those nouns, verbs, and adjectives (brillig, toves, ….’&c. ) in Jabwerwocky mean?
dank48 - April 24, 2012 at 12:05 pm
Pretty much what you want them to mean, which is one reason “Jabberwocky,” despite its coherent plot line, qualifies as nonsense.
jffoster - April 24, 2012 at 12:22 pm
Grammatical English sentences and poetry though. And you can pick the “meaning, or content words” out without knowing what they mean.
socwwp3 - April 24, 2012 at 1:04 pm
“Just listen” is very attractive, but too whom and what one is listening must be important. My generation was reared on the King James Bible which gave us an ear for beauty and an appreciation for grammar that may have been denied many in later years. I have not heard nor seen a reference to elegance and grace in good writing by the expositors of skillful writing in many years.
josgirl13 - April 24, 2012 at 4:26 pm
I’ll take advice from Eudora Welty anytime. English is a very aural language, and it’s important to understand and use that fact to one’s advantage. I write poetry and prose (creative nonfiction, for the most part), and in rewriting/polishing I always read my work out loud — repeatedly. The practice always leads to improvement. As for the article’s main point (the value of working with content-rich sentences), I agree completely.
jffoster - April 24, 2012 at 8:48 pm
What is a “very aural” language? Can you give us any examples of living, spoken, languages that aren’t aural, very or not?
magyar - April 25, 2012 at 10:19 am
That is the kind of comment that over at Language Log they call “walking backwards into a buzzsaw”. The most cursory search of the web throws up examples of references to elegance and grace in contemporary English writing. How about this (on page one of a Google search for the term)
‘Few writers in the genre today have Hill’s gifts: formidable intelligence, quick humour, compassion and a prose style that blends elegance and grace’ Donna Leon, Sunday Times
From:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ruling-Passion-Dalziel-Pascoe-Reginald/dp/0586072608/ref=br_lf_m_1000278873_1_7_rvw?ie=UTF8&m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&s=books&pf_rd_p=466444933&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_t=1401&pf_rd_i=1000278873&pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_r=0K7M8J76JBVYH0C75VHD
dank48 - April 25, 2012 at 10:50 am
Sure; without the “standard” structure of grammar, spelling, syntax, capitalization, and so on, it would be inchoatic, incomprehensible gibberish. It wouldn’t even be nonsense. Carroll of course didn’t need novel words to express his unique take on things:
What use are such gaieties to me,
Whose mind is full of indices and surds?
x squared plus seven x plus fifty-three
Equals eleven thirds.
cronicao - April 25, 2012 at 11:19 pm
Unlike most academic prose, “Jabberwocky” is _intentional_ nonsense.
tsrmurthy - April 26, 2012 at 9:12 am
“Verbal fluency is the produce of hours spent writing about nothing,” should make one think. What’s the connection between verbal fluency and writing about nothing? One can understand, in a Foucaultian way, that we fight our phantoms by means of language, that is by not articulating our voice, and thinking animatedly about it. Therefore, verbal fluency may have something to do with not saying anything on a given topic/issue for a long time, and just thinking about it. But verbal fluency and hours spent writing about nothing… There’s obvious freudian slip somewhere in this fishing and ferrying. Perhaps what Fish wishes to say is, writing fluency is the produce of hours spent not writing about something but thinking deeply about it… etc etc