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Picking a theme for a party is pretty easy—always go karate party, because they come with nunchuck egg rolls. Themes in writing are a little diff...

Calling a book “non-fiction” is a bit like saying you have a dog. Sure it covers the basics, but there's a big difference between a Doberman an...

ELA Drills, Advanced: Punctuation 4. Which of the words is spelled correctly?

ELA Drills, Intermediate: Meanings 1. Choose the words that would give the sentence an "insecure" or a "confident" tone.

Historians are still debating whether or not the first paragraph was written by a caveman named Krog.* While they're busy debating, you should watc...

Today we're learning all about allusions. We're pretty much the David Blaines of allusions. Oh you didn't know? Along with illusions, he's actually...

Hm. So this is supposed to be a summary of a video about...summaries. Well, to summarize we just talk about summaries and—ugh, this is getting to...

If you think stories about Abraham Lincoln hunting vampires were written with absolutely no research...well...we understand. But the fact is that a...

Sorry to disappoint, but this isn't a religion centered around banging metal plates together. Symbolism is a literary device authors use all the ti...

If you're building a case involving literature does that make it a...bookcase? Well, not in this case. Check out the video to learn all about what...

Review, revise, recycle, reuse...we're getting the feeling re-thinging things is a good idea in general. Make sure to re-watch this video over and...

Point your view at the screen and we'll teach you all about points of view in this Shmoopy video. 

ELA Drills, Intermediate: Spelling 3

Personally we don't like it when anything creeps. It's just...creepy. Today we'll learn all about preventing that from happening with opinions. You...

Quick. Run for the fiber bars, we've got all kinds of irregularity in this video. Oh wait...thank goodness. It's just with the verbs. Let's learn a...

Today we'll learn about how people tend to write about things that are going on in the time period they live in. You know, kind of like how you're...

This video will allow only the most perfect verbs in it. We're not kidding. If you're an imperfect verb you'd better not even watch. We're looking...

Step one: find the story's narrator. Step two: wait until they fall asleep. Step three: carefully trace their outline. Boom. Done. Or you could do...

For when the first search just didn't quite cut it...

Who says documentaries are boring? This video's basically a mini documentary about documentaries and it's awesome. Right everyone? Right? ...We'll...