The Business of Being Dracula
Grammar: Cleft sentences and inversion for emphasis
A Level 5 English lesson exploring media.
What's in this lesson
A Level 5 (advanced) ESL lesson on media, practising cleft sentences and inversion for emphasis. The worksheet has a reading, target vocabulary and discussion questions.
From the reading: The Business of Being Dracula
It was not a blockbuster debut. When the Irish novelist Bram Stoker published Dracula in 1897, reviews were polite but unexcited, sales were modest, and Stoker died in 1912 having never seen his creation become what it would. What neither he nor his publishers could have anticipated was that the novel's epistolary format — its patchwork of diaries, letters, and newspaper clippings — would prove to be the very structure that made the story endlessly adaptable. Strip away the letters and you still have the architecture: a charismatic outsider, a clash of the ancient and the modern, and a terror that is at once personal and systemic. That, it turns out, is a formula with extraordinary commercial durability.
Vocabulary
- at once
- It turns out
- Paradoxically
- to this day
- At the heart of
- cemented
- made the architecture of
- strip away
Discussion questions
- What is one story, film, or character from your culture that everyone knows?
- Do you think monsters in stories reflect real fears?
- Has a book ever changed the way you see a place?
The Business of Being Dracula
Grammar: Cleft sentences and inversion for emphasis
What's in this lesson:
Full lesson plan with reading, grammar, vocabulary, and discussion.
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