Grade 8 Language Arts: True Crime & Vocabulary Review

Vocabulary terms covering investigative concepts, paraphrasing techniques, and commonly confused words from the Grade 8 True Crime unit.

Circumstantial Evidence

Evidence that relies on an inference or connection to draw a conclusion rather than direct observation.

Tangible Evidence

Physical evidence consisting of an actual, touchable object or record.

Inference

A conclusion or interpretation reached on the basis of evidence and reasoning.

Perpetrator

The person responsible for committing a crime or harmful act.

Alibi

A claim or piece of evidence showing that a suspect was in another place when a crime occurred.

Motive

The reason or driving cause for someone committing a crime.

Baffling

Puzzling, confusing, or difficult for investigators to understand or explain.

Prosecutor

A lawyer or legal representative who conducts the case against a suspect in court.

Refuting

Proving a statement, theory, or argument to be false or wrong.

Verdict

The official decision or judgment reached at the conclusion of a case.

Paraphrasing

Rewriting someone else's ideas completely in your own words without changing the original meaning.

Direct Quote

Text copied word-for-word from an original source, placed inside quotation marks.

Plagiarism

Copying someone else's work or sentence structure with only minor word changes (patchwriting) without proper attribution.

Investigation Steps

The four key tasks in building a case: Evidence Collection, Timeline Construction, Interviewing Witnesses, and Analyzing Footage.

Affect

A verb meaning to influence or produce a change in something or someone.

Effect

A noun referring to the result or outcome of a change.

Than

A conjunction used when making comparisons between two things.

Then

An adverb used to indicate time, sequence, or order of events.

Accept

A verb meaning to agree with, receive, or believe in something.

Except

A word used as a preposition or conjunction meaning excluding or leaving out.

Lose

A verb meaning to fail to win or to misplace an item.

Loose

An adjective describing something that is not tight or unfastened.

Their

A possessive pronoun showing that something belongs to them.

There

An adverb referring to a specific place or location.

They're

A contraction formed from the phrase 'they are'.