Describes an assignment in which students sharpen their punctuation skills by arranging poems without punctuation in a prose form with appropriate punctuation. Suggests using the poetry of a fictional character from Don Marqui's "archy and mehitabel." (TB)

Describes a fun outdoor assignment whereby secondary school students form into groups of four or five and learn about the importance of narrative setting by drawing on sidewalks with chalk. Reviews the five basic elements of setting: temporal, geographical, cultural, historical, and environmental. (TB)

Offers an exercise to help students understand the difference between summarizing and paraphrasing and how both practices can result in plagiarism if the original source is not cited. Explains how the exercise uses Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address." (TB)

Shows how students may play the role of the advice-giving columnist as a means to learning about the fallacies of logic. (TB)

Describes a writing assignment based on a "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode in which an alien sacrifices his life so two cultures can come together. Provides questions for students to answer during the viewing of the episode. Suggests a writing assignment (and several variations) in which students create their own alien. (TB)

Describes two writing assignments that may be used to make Shakespeare more approachable and understandable: first a paraphrase of a passage, and second a memo to an actor interpreting the same passage. (TB)

Describes a series of exercises designed to help students of technical writing to see the virtues of revision. Suggests that students may learn from finding sections of their own textbooks that they can revise both linguistically and graphically. (TB)

Describes a writing course project that provides students with a portfolio of works representing various stages of their own growth and writing achievement. Shows how the project results in a published volume of student writing. Argues that the project also validates the effectiveness of the English curriculum. (HB)

Describes how and why the author has students in his composition classes collaboratively create scoring guides. Argues that this focuses students on the goals of the paper and provides a clear notion of how to improve their own performance. Offers scoring guides. Comments on the process that created them. Offers guidelines for using scoring guides…

Provides a number of reading and discussion exercises on issue-oriented questions (such as "overpopulation") that may be used for just about any level of English-as-a-Second-Language instruction. Suggests a role-play exercise in imitation of the television show "Dating Game." (TB)