English 11B Glossary - Technical Words
English 11B Vocab List - Vocabulary Words
Reminder!
These notes are to help you study and remind you what will be covered by the Post-Test! You still need to re-read the Reading Selections (and go back to take a second look at the "Analysis" Sections in Edmentum)!
Nearly all literature conveys common aspects of the human experience through events, emotions, or characters. Because of these commonalities, similar topics and themes run through many authors' works. For example, Washington Irving's "The Devil and Tom Walker" and Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" are short stories that cover the theme of greed and its consequences.
When a theme transcends time periods, a literary discussion about the topic develops over multiple literary eras. Writers often use literature to express views and opinions about specific topics or themes. Looking at literature over time shows how thoughts and ideas related to the topic have changed over the course of decades or even centuries.
Consider how the relationship between men and women is characterized in "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Published in 1899, the story portrays a female protagonist who is subjected to her husband's directives:
I don't like our room a bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza [large porch] . . . but John would not hear of it.
He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction.
The relationship between the characters in the story captures the real-world dynamics between men and women at the end of the nineteenth century. It was a male-dominated society where women were expected to follow their husbands’ decisions.
You can contrast "The Yellow Wallpaper" with "Winter Dreams" by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Published in 1922, Fitzgerald's story portrays the relationship between men and women quite differently than Gilman's, though it was written less than 25 years later. In Fitzgerald's story, a young man named Dexter rearranges many aspects of his life at the whim of the girl of his dreams, Judy. The power dynamic shifts from the one created by Gilman: the man’s life is subject to the choices made by the woman.
Why is the evolution of this topic important in American literature? Consider the events that took place in US history between the publications of the two stories. The women's suffrage movement culminated in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1920. Women gained more autonomy in society and became better educated. Literature reflected the changing dynamics between men and women.
Before learning why it’s important to vary sentence structures, you should be familiar with the following concepts:
clause: a group of words that contain a subject and a verb
complex sentence: a sentence that includes both an independent clause and a dependent clause
phrase: a group of words used as a single part of speech that lacks either a subject or a verb
simple sentence: a sentence that is made up of one independent clause
tone: a writer’s or speaker’s attitude towards a subject in a written or spoken work
Sentence variety is a subtle but important aspect of any written text. A reader may find a text to be dull and repetitive when it has many sentences with the same structure and length. Varying sentence structure and length allows writers to develop different voices, tones, and pacing in their texts. For example, short, uncomplicated sentences often imply an unsophisticated speaker. Long sentences can be used to cover a lot of information, whereas short sentences are usually used to emphasize important points.
See the following example from "This Sentence Has Five Words" by Gary Provost, an American Writer:
"Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals—sounds that say listen to this, it is important."
Short sentences often lend a youthful voice, since children usually string short statements together. Adults tend to give longer explanations and reasons when giving information. Punctuation makes a big difference as well.
Sentence variety can also affect the overall pacing of a text. It may create a sense of urgency or a feeling of lethargy, depending on how the sentences are structured. There is an urgency created by the short, choppy sentences. You can differentiate these kinds of sentences from a youthful voice by changing the diction (words used).
Sentence structure may vary even within the same text to indicate different voices or establish a pace that matches a mood or setting.
N. Scott Momaday was born on a Kiowa Indian reservation in 1934, where he lived for the first year of his life. His family then moved to Arizona. His parents were both teachers on American Indian reservations, which exposed Momaday to many different American Indian cultures, including Navajo, Apache, and Pueblo.
Momaday worked to educate Americans about American Indian tribes. He has written essays, novels, poetry, and plays and drawn and painted images and interpretations of different American Indian cultures. In 2007, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts for his efforts to "celebrate and preserve [American Indian] art and oral tradition."
The Way to Rainy Mountain, published in 1969 and illustrated by Momaday's father, Al Momaday, is a collection of Kiowa stories that Momaday learned while studying the Kiowa oral tradition.
While reading a text written from a perspective you have never encountered before, you may become confused by new cultural details. It's important that you understand and appreciate different customs to get the most out of a reading. Exposure to other cultures through literature will help you learn more about different cultures throughout the world.
Authors often explain unusual customs within the text itself, either directly or through the inclusion of contextual clues. But it is sometimes up to the reader to do additional research to discover the meanings of different cultural practices. You can look on the Internet or conduct research at the library to make your own notes about different cultural practices. There are websites that give detailed descriptions about customs and traditional rituals related to birth, marriage, religious holidays, and death across different cultures.
Click here for a refresher on characters in cultural settings, from ENG 10A!
N. Scott Momaday's writing in his introduction to The Way to Rainy Mountain involves long sentences that often contain multiple phrases and clauses help illustrate the slow, expansive history and landscapes that the narrative portrays.
Momaday's writing style changes, however, when he transcribes the Kiowa story that his grandmother told. The sentences are much more straightforward and parallel in structure, perhaps to imitate Momaday's grandmother's speech, or even to emphasize the difference between his own factual descriptions and the fictional story he relates.
American Indians did not have written languages before encountering Europeans. The development of American Indian language character systems didn't begin until the early nineteenth century. Instead of recording their histories and stories in written form, tribes preserved stories through oral storytelling. The stories were memorized, recited, and passed down through the generations. The legacy of the oral tradition is found in Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain.
The Cherokee creation story "How the World Was Made" was preserved through oral storytelling. Creation stories explain the origins of existence according to the traditions of a culture or religion. “How the World Was Made” describes the origin of the earth and how animals and people came to inhabit the land. Watch the following video to hear a presentation of this story.
The Cherokee story is an example of an earth diver creation story. Recall that earth diver stories feature the planet emerging from water. Rather than describe the creation of all existence from nothing, like ex nihilo stories, earth diver stories portray the creation of earth from a vast expanse of water. The featured character is the earth diver, usually an animal, which dives into the water to bring up a small amount of sand or mud. Often, there are supporting characters—also animals—that make failed attempts to retrieve the earth. Once the earth diver is successful, the bit of mud or sand he has brought from below the water expands to become dry land.
Strategies used to evaluate literature can also be applied to other media. In the ads featured in the video below about summer fun, they make use of alliteration, consonance, and assonance.
Before beginning this section, you should be familiar with the following concepts:
primary source—a work that contains original or firsthand information, such as a photograph, an eyewitness newspaper report, or an autobiography
style—the combination of distinctive features of literary or artistic expression, execution, or performance characterizing a particular person, group, school, or era
For a refresher on primary and secondary sources, click here to see these notes from ENG 10B!
Historical and cultural context is key to an in-depth understanding of literature. Literary eras, styles, movements, and authors are shaped by their sociopolitical context. Readers should consider every literary era within its historical and cultural context. Without that context, the literature cannot be fully understood.
Primary source documents often provide context for a literary work. For example, Jack London's 1917 essay "The Human Drift" discusses the application of evolution to worldwide human expansion. Charles Woodruff’s Expansion of Races, which London cites as a source document, theorized about the evolution of humans from the general evolutionary concept in On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. Because the current understanding of evolution and its application is quite different than that of the early twentieth century, reading Expansion of Races helps the reader understand the sections on evolution in London's essay.
Before beginning this section, you should be familiar with the following concepts:
dystopia—a fictional setting in which the living conditions are extremely poor or people are severely deprived
genre—a classification of literature characterized by particular content and form
The beginnings of the contemporary literary period coincide with a major period of social activism in the civil rights arena, particularly the feminist movement. It was also a time of political unrest, represented by the Watergate scandal that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation. Protests and rallies were common across the country during the 1960s and 1970s. Like the two preceding movements, modernism and postmodernism, the contemporary period emerged in response to the changing sociopolitical atmosphere in the United States. However, the contemporary period was not a response to a world war. Instead, contemporary literature developed largely in response to the Cold War, the tumultuous US political landscape, and the steady adoption of technological advancements.
The increase in US adoption of technology affected all aspects of life, as televisions and then computers became commonplace in the average household. Representing this shift was the 1980 election of former television and movie star Ronald Reagan to the US presidency. Under the influence of television and later the Internet, the country and the world became a conceptually smaller place. Long distances were traversed instantly via television and other connections, expanding the average person's access to information.
Another aspect of contemporary literature is the influence and inclusion of technology. Cyberpunk, for example, a genre credited to contemporary science fiction writer Bruce Bethke, addresses the dehumanizing and potentially dystopian outcome of dependence on high-end technology. Even the term cyberspace was coined by contemporary author William Gibson, who used it in his short story "Burning Chrome" and his novel Neuromancer.
A defining characteristic of contemporary literature is the broad influence of cultural diversity. Second- and third-generation immigrants—who struggled to blend traditional family backgrounds with modern US culture—infused contemporary literature with distinct, varied styles and themes.
Another characteristic is the divergence from tradition seen in modernism and postmodernism. Blurring definitional lines even further than its predecessors, contemporary literature continues to reexamine and reinvent form, genre, and other aspects of writing.
For example, in Truman Capote's novel In Cold Blood, described as a "nonfiction novel," uses the techniques of fiction to explore a real-life crime. Although no motive had ever been publicly revealed, Capote surmises and invents the fictional thoughts of a real-life person committing a real murder, effectively blurring the line between fiction and nonfiction. Although these sorts of stories are common place now, they were new and impactful at the time.
In the early 1900's, as hundreds of thousands of immigrants entered the United States, the predominant view of how immigration affected the country was the "melting pot" theory, named for a phrase coined by French immigrant J. Hector Crevecoeur in 1782. This theory maintained that as new Americans assimilated to the United States, the characteristics of their former countries would blend together to create one dominant general culture. Critics of the melting pot theory worried that immigrants would be stripped of their individual cultures.
However, as immigration and attitudes toward it changed over the next century, a new theory developed. The focus shifted to the importance of individual cultures. Sometimes called the "salad bowl" theory, it says that individual cultures can flourish and maintain their identity while still contributing to a larger mosaic of American society. Rather than emphasizing assimilation and conformity, the focus is now on embracing multiple cultures.
People in different countries have different upbringings, lifestyles, and educations. Therefore, it’s no surprise that people from diverse backgrounds have diverse thoughts, ideas, beliefs, and demeanors. For example, some people are raised to follow rules, while others are taught to question the way things are.
These cultural differences are also found in literature. The works of different writers reflect their perspectives, styles, and thematic visions, which are influenced by their heritage. Writers sometimes allude to their heritage in their works. Readers get an idea about writers’ childhoods as well as significant events that affected their lives.
Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London to Bengali-Indian parents, who named her Nilanjana. As a toddler, she moved to the United States with her family, but she visited her extended family in India frequently. They called her "Jhumpa," an affectionate nickname. In Bengali custom, family and close friends call a child by a nickname, but a child's given name is used in school and in public. Lahiri's parents tried to enroll her in school under her given name, but a teacher asked her if she went by a shorter name.
Lahiri writes about Indian immigrants to the United States and their experiences dealing with these types of cultural differences. She often explores the relationships of immigrants and their American-born children, as in her novel The Namesake. Her first book of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. She was the first Indian woman to win this award.
Before reading this knowledge article, you should be familiar with the following concepts:
first-person point of view—the point of view from which a narrator or speaker describes events using the pronouns I, me, us, and we
perspective—a personal point of view, often influenced by age, gender, interests, race, culture, and experiences
point of view—the perspective from which a story is told (see first-person point of view, second-person point of view, and third-person point of view)
second-person point of view—the point of view through which a story's narrator addresses another character or the reader directly using the pronoun you
third-person limited point of view—the third-person point of view in which the narrator describes the experiences and thoughts of one central character in a text
third-person omniscient point of view—the third-person point of view in which the narrator describes the experiences and thoughts of more than one character in a text
third-person point of view—the point of view from which the narrator describes events but does not participate in them; uses the pronouns she, he, or they
Authors use second-person point of view, the perspective in which the narrator addresses a character in the text or the reader using the word you to draw the reader into the story. Second-person point of view is relatively rare in literature.
The use of second-person point of view is an unusual way of presenting a narration that is essentially first person. When reading from this perspective, the reader has access to just one character's thoughts, as in a first-person narration. Instead of hearing those thoughts from the narrator's point of view with an emphasis on the word I, the reader is directly engaged in a conversation with the speaker using the second-person you. The you in second-person point of view may refer to the reader or to a character in the story. In the latter approach, this narrative encourages the reader to empathize with the character.
In the following excerpt from "A New Kind of War," notice how Ernest Hemingway uses the word you to bring the reader into the world he describes:
You went to the front early in the morning in a miserable little car with a more miserable little chauffeur who suffered visibly the closer he came to the fighting. But at night, sometimes late, without lights, with the big trucks roaring past, you came on back to sleep in a bed with sheets in a good hotel, paying a dollar a day for the best rooms on the front.
Click here to read a full Knowledge Article about second-person POV!
The connection between the title of a work and the work itself isn’t always clear. Authors may choose to title a work in a certain way to suggest something about the theme, characters, or subject. Titles also sometimes come from a direct quotation in the text. Before reading a work, think about what the title suggests. As you read, consider how the text connects to the title.
The connection between the title of a work and the work itself is not always clear. Authors may title a work to suggest something about the theme, characters, or subject. Titles also sometimes come from a line in the text. Before reading a text, think about what the title suggests. As you read, consider ways in which the text connects to the title.
The narrator in "Once in a Lifetime" is a young girl named Hema, a Bengali-American who dutifully obeys her parents. As she speaks to "you" throughout the story, she is addressing Kaushik, a boy a few years older than she. By addressing Kaushik in the second person, Hema subconsciously compares their experiences as Bengali-Americans. Although they are both children of first-generation immigrants, they have vastly different experiences—Kaushik has lived both in the United States and in India, while Hema has lived all her life in the United States. Additionally, the use of the word "you" helps the reader experience Indian culture by assuming the role of "you," or Kaushik.
The second-person point of view in "Once in a Lifetime" helps the reader understand Hema's inner feelings toward Kaushik. Because the story is told from her perspective, the reader empathizes with her mixed feelings of admiration, infatuation, and frustration for Kaushik.
Authors use their writing to explore different facets, or parts, of personal identity. Through reflective essays, writers can explore their experiences, thoughts, and identities. Some reflective essays probe relationships or illustrate how writers connect with their families and society.
Reflective essays often show how the author thinks or what the author believes today as well as where those thoughts and beliefs came from. In other words, they not only tell about the author's identity, but also how the author's identity came to be.
Reflective essays should cover the following the points:
Provide information about your personality and also on the relationships you share with the people mentioned in your essay.
Provide coherent details about the event or incident that you describe in your essay.
Provide insight into how your experience affected your identity and life.
Have you ever noticed that you talk differently with different groups of people? Maybe you talk in a specific way with your family, a different way with your friends, and still another way with your teachers at school or your employers at work.
This process of changing how you communicate is called code-switching. Specifically, this term describes people varying the way they speak when they function in different cultures that use different languages.
Amy Tan was born in 1952 to first-generation Chinese immigrants in California. Her father and older brother died of brain tumors within one year of each other, leaving Tan, her mother, and her younger brother to fend for themselves. The family moved to Switzerland while Tan was in high school. During this period, Tan and her mother did not get along; they even went as long as six months without speaking to each other.
Although Tan’s relationship with her mother improved after they traveled together to China in 1987, many of Tan's stories deal with their rocky relationship. Tan's first book, The Joy Luck Club, contains short stories about their relationship, including this lesson's reading selection, entitled "Mother Tongue." While reading, consider how Tan's identity has been shaped by the languages she uses.
Several words can have the same common root in English. It is the prefix or suffix that determines a word's part of speech.
For example, the word sense, which is a verb with the root sens, means “to feel.” Now take a look at the following:
sense (verb)
Used in a sentence: I sense that Sam is scared of the dark.
sensible (adj)
Used in a sentence: Taylor is a sensible person.
sensibly (adv)
Used in a sentence: Rob sensibly saved some of his pocket money.
sensibleness (noun)
Used in a sentence: Lucy’s sensibleness made the whole class behave.
Note that although all these words have the same root, sens, the meaning and part of speech changes depending on the suffix. When the adjective sensible takes the suffix -ness, it becomes the noun sensibleness. When this adjective takes the suffix -ly, it becomes the adverb sensibly.
noun suffixes
-ship, -ness, -ivity, -bility, -hood, -er, -ity, -or, -tion, -sion, -ment, -yst, -let, -ence
examples: friendship, madness, connectivity, responsibility, motherhood, forgiver, clarity, administrator, excitation, conclusion, enjoyment, analyst, droplet, inexperience
verb suffixes
-ing, -ate, -ize, -ed, -ine, -yze, -en, -vene
examples: walking, integrate, organize, liberated, define, analyze, shorten, convene
adjective suffixes
-er, -ory, -ive, -ous, -ile, -ar, -or, -ible, -al, -y, -able, -ed, -ing, -lent, -less, -ite
examples: forgettable, contradictory, expressive, benevolent, fragile, secular,inferior, legible, nocturnal, tasteless, clearer, spirited, caring, joyous, cloudy, favorite
adverb suffixes
-ly, -wards, -wise, -ibly, -ably, -ally
examples: clearly, backwards, clockwise, visibly, unfavorably, asymmetrically
Note that some suffixes, such as -ed and -ing, work with more than one part of speech, so use context to determine the part of speech when you encounter new vocabulary.
For refresher on different parts of speech, you can see these notes from ENG 11A!
Ambiguity is a technique in which a word, phrase, or event can be interpreted as having more than one meaning or explanation.
Sometimes authors intentionally use ambiguity to engage readers and add depth and richness. If a story has you asking questions, you may be more engaged with the story and its outcome. One interpretation or explanation is not necessarily more correct than others. That allows readers to add their own spin on what appears to be static text. Poets who are known for using ambiguity include Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot. However, ambiguity is not limited to poetry. It is also found in prose and the visual arts.
Culture is defined as a set of shared values, beliefs, and practices that distinguishes a group of people.
A tradition is a custom practiced by a culture and often handed down orally from generation to generation.
Many people can easily relate to stories told from a cultural perspective similar to their own. A young farmer who has never left his home might prefer stories about life on the farm, while someone who lives in a city might prefer a book about busy urban life.
But experiencing different settings and cultures can help you evaluate the society you live in and your connection to other cultures. Short of visiting all the cultures of the world, art and literature provide the best means of having these experiences.
Some authors use literature to explore traditions and cultures that are different from their own. Others use details from their personal background to express different aspects of their own culture. Through the works of these authors, readers can build an emotional connection with a different culture.
Authors illuminate traditions and cultures in various ways. They may write about food, language, holidays, or religion. They also address tradition by writing about the impact their family has on their adult identities. Immigrant parents often emphasize cultural traditions as a connection to their homeland, which influences the experiences and views of their children. Multicultural experiences are also rich sources for fiction and nonfiction.
Alice Walker grew up in Georgia. When she was eight, a BB gun accident left her partially blind in one eye. This incident made Walker introverted and isolated, which sparked her interest in writing and poetry. After graduating from Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, Walker began working for racial justice in Mississippi.
Walker’s writing reveals the lives of African American women, focusing on their role in society, relationships, and struggles. She uses the word womanist to describe the appreciation of women's culture, emotions, and character, focusing on the human experience and female relationships.
Zora Neale Hurston heavily influenced Walker, who worked to create anthologies of Hurston's work. Walker was one of the key figures involved in dedicating Hurston's grave and establishing her as a role model for African American female writers.
At the heart of the story “Everyday Use” is about the relationship between a mother and her two daughters, Dee and Maggie. Dee is a bright, beautiful young woman who “wants nice things,” and she chides her mother and sister for not feeling the same way. Younger sister Maggie is shy and slow to learn, but she is also generous and kind.
Writers of media such as news, films, and advertisement use literary techniques to inform, persuade, or entertain audiences.
Consider television. A television news broadcast’s purpose is to inform viewers about a particular story or piece of information and how it relates to their lives. TV stations use journalistic practices to state information clearly and accurately, with limited bias or outside perspective. However, these news sources also seek to entertain viewers and keep their interest long enough to watch the program.
The sequencing of information and word choice in a news story influences how the audience interprets the information. Even though news sources attempt to be unbiased, the effort to entertain an audience sometimes includes appeals to logic and emotion, which lean in the direction of persuasion. Thus media can simultaneously entertain, persuade, and inform the viewer.
Culture is a set of shared values, beliefs, and practices that distinguishes a group of people. Many contemporary American authors represent and highlight the diverse culture of the United States. Their writing also reveals the diverse lifestyles in different regions of the country. Through these works, readers can explore a culture that may be unfamiliar.
The United States is becoming increasingly diverse as immigrants arrive from different nations. Authors who have a multicultural upbringing use literature to explore their complex backgrounds. Many use literature as a tool to help resolve the struggle between adapting to life in the United States while simultaneously honoring the traditions of their cultural heritage.
Cultural diversity is a common theme in contemporary literature. Cultural diversity often includes diversity of socioeconomic status, which is a term describing social hierarchies based on a person's education, career, income, and place of residence.
By examining diversity in socioeconomic status, authors highlight various lifestyles to show what opportunities people have (or don't have) in the United States. Similar to themes involving cultural diversity, themes that illustrate socioeconomic diversity acquaint readers with the lifestyles of people from cultures that they may not be familiar with, including different classes and levels of education. An author's description of unfamiliar socioeconomic conditions can help a reader empathize with the characters in the story.
Lorna Dee Cervantes is of Mexican and American Indian descent. She grew up in San Jose, California. Cervantes began writing poetry when she was 8 years old. As a young adult, she started a literary journal that featured Mexican American poets and authors. Although her family spoke Spanish, Cervantes was not allowed to speak the language at home as a child, which her family thought would protect her from racism. However, this restriction resulted in an inability to identify with her Latin culture—a situation that ultimately served as inspiration for her poetry.
Cervantes does not distinguish the parts of her poem that are in Spanish by italicizing or setting them apart in some way. This technique suggests that she feels at home with writing in both English and Spanish and that her native language is a blend of these two languages.
Rather than differentiating between Spanish and English, the speaker combines the two languages to create a unique language that celebrates both of the cultures to which she belongs.
In the last stanza of "Freeway 280," the speaker discusses something unnamed and ambiguous that she has been looking for. She is searching for a part of her identity, as indicated in the line "where I'll find it, that part of me." She tells readers that the part of her identity that she is looking for is linked to the place where she grew up. Although this place has become unkempt and overgrown, she still feels attached to it. By beginning this stanza with the word maybe, Cervantes suggests that her speaker is on a quest to determine her complete identity.
A hyphen is primarily used to join two words and create a compound word. For example, a hyphen connects the words user and friendly to form user-friendly.
Hyphens also help clarify the meanings of some words that can be ambiguous or misunderstood. For example, the meaning of the word re-sign, which means “to sign again,” differs from resign, which means “to quit.” The words are pronounced differently too. The hyphen clarifies this difference in meaning and pronunciation. Look at these sentences to better understand the difference.
The lease on Jake’s apartment is almost up, and he has to re-sign it.
Jake plans to resign from his job and move to New York.
Hyphens are also often used with prefixes such as re-, ex-, pre-, self-, all-, and anti- and with suffixes such as -type, -like, and -elect.
Here are some examples of hyphens used with prefixes: re-cover, ex-boyfriend, pre-sales, self-righteous, all-purpose, anti-inflammatory. However, there are exceptions, such as the word reopen.
Here are some examples of hyphens used with suffixes: shell-like and president-elect. As you may have guessed, there are exceptions, such as the word childlike. If you are unsure about whether to use a hyphen with a prefix or suffix, check a dictionary.
Hyphens are also used with letters, figures, and between a prefix and a capitalized word as in L-shaped mark, mid-thirties, post-war, T-shirt, and mid-November.
The rules of hyphenation apply to line breaks as well. If a hyphenated word appears at the end of a line, then the word should be split at the hyphen:
That book was written by a well-
known author.
If the word at the end of a line ends with the suffix -ing then the word can be broken using a hyphen before the suffix. If the consonant at the end of a word ending with -ing has been doubled, then the hyphen can be placed there. Look at these examples:
Tanya is driv-
ing a black sedan.
Kerry has been plan-
ning to renovate her studio.
When other words need to be divided at the end of a line, the hyphen should be placed between syllables. For example, if the two-syllable word playful appears at the end of a line and must be divided, you can place the hyphen between the syllables: play-ful. If a three-syllable word appears at the end of a line and has to be divided, you can place the hyphen between any of the three syllables, for example, em-ploy-ee, and so on.
Exceptions:
An exception to placing a hyphen between syllables when dividing a word at a line break is when the syllable at the start of the word is just one letter. In other words, the word at the end of a sentence must not be split by putting a hyphen after the first letter of the word. In such cases, the correct way to break a word using a hyphen is after the next syllable. For example, the word evaluate, can be broken with a hyphen on either side of the letter u:
Mrs. Jones wants to eval-
uate her students’ performance in the month of April.
or
Mrs. Jones wants to evalu-
ate her students’ performance in the month of April.
Finally, never add a hyphen before the suffix when a word has a two-letter suffix such as -ly or -ed. For example, if the word lovely appears at the end of a line, do not add a hyphen before the suffix and start a new line that begins with -ly.
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