A group made to mentor two classes whose geographical distance from one another plays only a small role in how close they are.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Keplyn

Second mentoring post, can see a problem in the future, lack of ideas pertaining to a small set of subjects... will have to be creative. You can see the comment here.

Hello Keplyn!

I was skimming through your post and this caught my eye:

"... the definition of frienship once again is: the state of being a friend; association as friends: to value a person’s friendship."

In this definition of friendship you use the root word (the word the other is derived from) and the word itself in the definitions. Is this the best way to define a word? Take this for example:

Ataraxia - the state of being ataraxic

Do you know what ataraxia really is from that definition? In the case of friendship we can assume that most people will know what a friend is so using friend in the definition is probably okay. But try to define friendship without using friend or any of it's other forms. It's a bit harder but would be clearer to anyone who doesn't know what friendship or friends are (even though those people may be few and far between).

P.S. Look up ataraxia, a bigger vocabulary never hurts

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi GreyM,

What wonderful comments you've left for Hannah and Keplyn!! The questions you ask Keplyn to help in understanding that words are best defined using other terms are excellent!!

You mention a concern about lack of ideas (I can really relate to that) and I wondered if you thought it might be useful to try to tie questions into the graphics chosen for the posts? or if using a quote about their topic and asking how they think it might apply to what they've been reading (WisdomQuotes often helps me although I'm sure you know others; this link goes to their friendship page) might work?

Bravo to you for taking on this project!!

Best,
Lani

BTW, I did look up ataraxic and increased my vocabulary! Thank you!

Grey-M said...

Thx Lani! The quotes idea is brilliant. Think I'll keep that in storage for when I'm really stumped.

ciao,
Graeme