Michael Rosen Quotes

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Michael Rosen

Profession : Author

Birth : May 7, 1946

Social groups in society don't swim about in some kind of harmonious melting pot. We rub against each other from very different and opposing positions, so why we should agree about language use and the means of describing it is beyond me.

Michael Rosen

Purely on their own, words are inert splashes of ink, sound waves, blips on a screen and the like. Our minds perceive these and make meaning and our minds are part of living in the real world.

Michael Rosen

I can't think of how many meetings I've sat through where people have explained that language has become less important because we now live in a visual age.

Michael Rosen

Linguists have noticed that across the history of language some words start out as obvious, conscious metaphors and then slowly embed themselves in our daily usage in such a way that we're no longer aware that they are metaphors.

Michael Rosen

Reading for pleasure can easily sound like some kind of wishy-washy, soft option, while instructional stuff like learning-to-read through 'synthetic phonics' and endless worksheets requiring children to answer questions about the facts in short passages, sounds tough and purposeful.

Michael Rosen

Any child who reads widely, often and for pleasure will inevitably make comparisons between what they're reading, why they're reading and how they're reading.

Michael Rosen

What's difficult to do in books for children is to create funny incidents. Funny images, funny language and any kind of taboo-breaking is not difficult.

Michael Rosen

Anyway, once children get to talk, they seem to be finding ways to joke.

Michael Rosen

In most countries, property law means that people can take possession of manuscripts and, in some circumstances, a lone copy of a printed text. In these cases where only one copy of the work exists the owners of the manuscript also find themselves in possession of its literature. Yet the two things ought not to be conflated.

Michael Rosen

The whole of Sheffield seems to be crazy about books. There are festivals and their own book awards, and their own children's book conferences for teachers and librarians.

Michael Rosen

The starting point for English work must be the ability to handle effectively their own experience. Oral work, written work and the discussion of literature must create an atmosphere in which the pupils become confident of the full acceptability of the material of their own experience.

Michael Rosen

Books are low-tech, portable packages of the widest range of human experience, presented in a format which gives time to grasp complex ideas or to spend time in imaginative worlds.

Michael Rosen

If you say to teachers, how can we, with the resources we've got here, develop a policy on reading books, then within minutes, people have ideas, make plans, invent activities.

Michael Rosen

Across the many years I've been involved with arts education, I have seen countless projects, schemes, partnerships and programmes, on and off site, being developed, flowering and then getting phased out.

Michael Rosen

When someone dies, you have to do many things that mark it: telling other people, getting rid of the body, writing to the bank, the tax man, the magazines and shops he subscribed to. No matter how hard this is, doing all this tells you it's really happened.

Michael Rosen

The empty room of someone who has gone to college, or is on holiday, is not much different from someone who has just died. We live in rooms. Then we don't.

Michael Rosen

Change in language is hard to capture and when it's visible or audible; it is also hard for some to accept.

Michael Rosen

My father was adept at making up limericks about place names we encountered on holidays or others using the names of new people we met.

Michael Rosen

Writing limericks gives us a playground, a release from these conventions.

Michael Rosen

We have an almost complete comprehensive primary school system in England. Surely, if grammar schools are some kind of answer to making education better for children over the age of 11, it would be the answer for children under the age of 11.

Michael Rosen