Describes several activities for generating writing ideas and writing assignments to capitalize on those activities. Assignments include recording the experience, describing a reaction to the experience, or forming a generalization based on the experience or a principle formalized as the result of the activity. (HTH)

Discusses the researched article as an alternative to the research paper and provides guidelines for students to follow in writing a query letter which sells the idea for the article. (RB)

Presents steps for a writing class project in producing thematic magazines that parallel the writing and literature themes of the course. Includes a 25-day schedule. (HTH)

Describes several activities using postcards as writing prompts at all classroom levels. (MM)

Describes an exercise in which students demonstrate what they have learned by working in groups to find incorrect grammar in newspaper writing. (SR)

Describes an exercise for basic writers which encompasses reading, listening, and writing. Finds that Edgar Allan Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart" has an effective vocabulary, a first-person conversational tone for the "mad" voice, and a second-person direct address that makes it easy to follow. Notes that inexperienced readers can…

An approach to teaching the writing of poetry is presented in this brief article. AUTHOR'S COMMENT (excerpt): A poet's purpose is to amuse, to instruct, to embellish truth, or to vitalize dull reality. Poets compress, using the minimum number of words to gain the maximum effect, yoking seemingly disparate ideas into metaphors, creating poetic…

Describes an exercise which promotes awareness of the recent movement to eliminate gender-biased noun and pronoun usage from the language. Provides instructions on how to change sexist noun and pronoun usages into non-sexist language, and lists several ways to make writing gender neutral. (MM)

Describes a role-playing activity to help students effectively extract information from an oral source, as in an interview. (MM)

Describes three exercises which use creative spelling in student-generated advertising, poetry, and dialect. (MM)

Describes an exercise designed to help student writers expand beyond writer-based prose by having them write for a particular magazine or newspaper audience. (MM)

Describes an activity that develops student writers' individual voices, even when collaborating closely in a writing workshop. Notes that the writing workshop allows students access to each other's writing processes and encourages consensus on revision directions. (MM)

Describes a writing assignment which allows students to exercise creativity communicating set facts while utilizing narrative techniques covered in class (sentence variety, dominant impressions, narrative action, detailing, etc.), and in which peers judge how effectively and consistently the information was communicated, illuminating the…

Explains how to get middle school through college students to write detailed paragraphs with the QUEEN FRANCIS method--an acronym that stands for "Qu"otes, "E"xamples, "E"xperts, "N"ames, "F"acts, "R"easons, "A"necdotes, "N"umbers, "C"oncrete words,…