• some history
Originally, the paired stories were the whole of flesl.net and a great deal of the other material now on the site came into existence as a supplement to one or another of them. After writing the stories and working with them for a while I realized that as well as providing reading practice and encouraging vocabulary expansion, they could be useful as a means of generating a catalog of difficult bits of grammatical and semantic information—a catalog which would have the disadvantage of being ad hoc and unorganized but which would also have the advantage of being tied to exemplificatory instances in a associated text. Sometime after embarking on the notes, however, I came to realize that, although they would be useful, writing them for all forty stories was going to be impossibly time consuming. So after producing several sets, I stopped.
Much more recently, as part of the long process of redesigning the site and reformatting the old pages, I started making "extras"—a collection of classroom handouts and teachers' notes to supplement the stories and it struck me that it would be unfortunate not to take advantage of this project as a way of integrating the the long-neglected “notes” into the newly organized site. The first three sets of notes linked in the Vocabulary Directory are the result; they are pared-down and reformatted versions of the original notes. The second group of notes—in square brackets—are the original versions of the notes for four other stories.
• how the notes could be used
Because their content is determined by the “accident” of the language that happens to be used in a particular story, and also because of the complexity of some of the explanations, the notes are not really appropriate material for systematic study. The most obvious way of using them effectively would be as a source of comments a teacher may make on a text before or after it is read. Certainly, I have often had the experience, while using a text in the classroom, of noticing some piece of language for the first time, and attempting to comment on it only to become confused and embarrassed. If nothing else, the grammar and meaning notes might reduce the frequency of such painful moments.
• the future of the notes
The notes still in the old format will be reworked. Links to the Grammar Glossary will be added. (There are already a few for the “Abdul Shanwaz” and “Percy Wacker.”) Also, notes may be written for other stories.