The Heart of a Con: Summary & Reactions

1) Please write a 50-word summary of "The Heart of a Con" (what happened, who did what). Remember to only write the most important things. Page 1 of the story is here:
http://cute-writing-grammar.blogspot.com/2012/03/the-heart-of-con-golden-age-comic.html
Please contact me if you want to read the whole story.

2) Also be ready to discuss (you don't need to write it) why people did what they did and your opinion of each person. Do you agree with Dr. Rogers? If Billy was your son, would you want Jack Kelsey to come work in your house? Why/why not?

Have you read stories like this in Chinese? Do you think this story is believable? Did you learn anything from it? Would this kind of story be OK for high school students, or do you think it's unhealthy? Please leave some comments below.

Here is a mind map showing the relationships between the characters in the story:

Mind map for characters in "The Heart of a Con"

The Heart of a Con (Golden Age Comic)

"The Heart of a Con" is a story from a Golden Age comic magazine. Originally published in 1952 (but now in the public domain), "The Heart of a Con" was scanned and made available by the wonderful folks at DCM. I have simplified the text and explained some difficult words in this comic to make it easier to understand. I am releasing my additions under a Creative Commons license (CC Robert Matthews, BY-NC-SA).

Here is page 1 of the PDF file:

"The Heart of a Con" page 1

You can read some reactions to this story here:

http://cute-writing-grammar.blogspot.com/2012/03/heart-of-con-summary-reactions.html

Mindmap Software: Xmind

There is lots of mindmapping software. Xmind has a free version that can be useful. You can use it to make collaborative mindmaps (you and your friends can look at it and change it together).

This version installs on your computer's hard disk.

This version can install on your USB drive, so you can bring it everywhere.

Wikisummarizer: a Free Text Summarizer

If you are reading a long article in English, you can use text summarizer software to save you time. For example, some articles in Wikipedia are very long, and there is no Chinese text to help you read it. Wikisummarizer gives you very attractive summaries of these articles.

(1) Go to Wikisummarizer and (2) paste in the first keyword. In this case, it's "Jonas."

If one word is not enough, choose the article you need (3) Jonas Salk

Next, click on Summarize (4) to produce a summary.

Add caption

In the visual summary, you can click on the "+" signs to see the mindmap expand in MMAP mindmap form (Use Xmind Free software to save it for later). In the tree view, you can save the text information in RTF form (use Microsoft Word to view it).

Rank Scale (grammar hierarchy)

Knowing English grammar will help you write well. One thing you need to notice is rank scale, or grammar hierarchy.

What is a hierarchy? Some people, such as the president of the US, are more important than other people, such as the governors of the 50 states. This is a government hierarchy:

English grammar has another kind of hierarchy. Sentences are more important than phrases (noun phrases and verb phrases), and phrases are more important than words. Finally, words are more important than morphemes (the bottom level: "teachers" is made of three morphemes: TEACH (a "Free" morpheme) + ER (A "Bound" morpheme) + -S).

Collocation Tool-1

Tango, a bilingual collocational concordancer, is a marvelous tool developed at the Natural Language Processing Lab at National Tsinghua University in Hsinchu. Type in either

1] a word in English or

2] a word in Chinese,

and the concordancer will help you locate collocations for that word, along with plenty of context. What's even better is that next to each paragraph you will see a translation in the other language. The translations were NOT produced by a computer. Both the English and the Chinese sentences were written by native speakers writing in their own languages. The sentences come from an 11-year archive of Sinorama. Sinorama was a high-quality bilingual magazine published in Taiwan (now it is called Taiwan Panorama).

Below you can see a search I did for the word rice. Rice is a noun, so I clicked the "Noun" button. Then I clicked on VN to see verb-noun collocations. The concordancer found collocations with 7 different verbs: eat, grow and cook are the most common collocations. If I click on 1. eat rice (9), I will see 8 more paragraphs (8+1 = 9) and the original Chinese versions.

http://candle.fl.nthu.edu.tw/collocation/webform2.aspx