Cleft sentences & inversion — The Business of Being Dracula
Grammar: Cleft sentences and inversion for emphasis
Free ESL grammar exercise on cleft sentences & inversion themed around the business of being dracula. Printable worksheet from classplan.ai.
What's on this worksheet
A Level 5 (advanced) ESL grammar exercise on media, practising cleft sentences and inversion for emphasis. The worksheet has a short reading excerpt, a grammar reference and graded practice items.
From the reading
What neither he nor his publishers could have anticipated was that the novel's format would prove so adaptable. Rarely had a monster been quite so appealing. Not only has each era found a Dracula that speaks to its own anxieties, but each version has expanded the original. It is the novel's deliberate vagueness that creates the interpretive space every new generation fills afresh.
Grammar
- It-cleft structure
- It + be + focused element + relative clause. It was Hamilton Deane who gave Dracula his cape. Stresses one specific element.
- Wh-cleft structure
- What-clause + be + complement. What the town sells is not history but atmosphere. Foregrounds the predicate.
Sample items
- ______ Bela Lugosi who cemented the vampire's visual identity in 1931.
- ______ the novel sells is not horror but interpretive space.
- Rarely ______ a fictional character generated so much annual revenue.
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