Literal vs. Figurative Meanings

While teaching English, I’ve realized that many words have literal and figurative meanings. This makes sense as language is a human/social creation. It no doubt emerged from literal observations of nature and society that later transmuted into a more metaphorical/figurative meaning. One such example is “fruitless.” Lately I have been growing plants in my rooftop apartment, and as I’ve become better acquainted with the life processes of plants, especially that of fruit, I’ve gotten insights into this word “fruitless.” It takes much energy for a plant to generate a bud and have it bloom into a flower. When these flowers are fertilized by bees or butterflies, they become transformed into fruits. However, there are many instances where a flower is not pollinated, and unfertilized it merely falls off unable to deliver its fruit. Hence, it is “fruitless.” Thus, all of the plants efforts at producing its seeds were wasted.

Unfortunately, most people forget the original meaning of a word. The literal original meaning of a word is lost and its place is left only the figurative, cut off from its original root. However, understanding the figurative meaning of a word may better help you understand its figurative meaning as well.

a not-fruitless plant

 

Sentence writing curriculum

Hi everyone,

After teaching English for five years in South Korea, I’ve started to gain many insights into the English language and on ways to teach it. I am starting this blog to share some of these insights as well as publicize my private English instruction services for those in Seoul, South Korea.

I’d like to start this blog entry by focusing on the importance of sentences as the unit of thought and building blocks of a paragraph and/or essay. Unfortunately, too often, writers ignore sentence structure and grammatical conventions either because they dread it, or because they find it too much a bother. However, once mastered, sentence structure and grammatical conventions can serve as tools in expressing complex and nuanced ideas.

The following is a syllabus of a sentence writing class that I currently teach. In future entries, I will also post some of my PowerPoint Presentations.

Purpose: to refine and master various types of sentence structures
Activity: learn the grammatical structures, practice sentence writing
class Sentence fundamentals Homework
1 Simple  -ing opener, -ed opener Writing 25 simple sentences
   Passive vs. Active when to use the passive voice (5 -ing opener, 5 -ed opener, 5 quotations, 5 semi-colons for a list)
Mechanics quotations, semi-colons when listed items contain commas (5 passive sentences)
2 Compound semi-colon, colon, commas, dashes, paranthesis Writing 20 compound sentences
   Essential vs. nonessential (5 semi-colon, 5 colon, 5 commas, 5 dash/paranthesis/commas)
3 Complex noun, adjective, adverb clause Writing 20 complex sentences
(5 noun clause, 10 adjective clause, 5 adverb clause)
4 Sentence flow how to create coherence in a group of sentences Writing a paragraph