Most students avoid the reflective nature the writing process requires. Their resistance to meta-cognition, thinking about one's thinking, often means they are incapable of capitalizing on their strengths or improving upon their weaknesses. The author believes students who are familiar with writers' lives and habits will be that much more…

English teachers have a unique opportunity to expand and develop the way their students think. Too often, students are comfortable in thinking about reading and writing processes in a concrete or linear way. They are used to "right" or "wrong" answers in their other studies and look for the same in their English assignments. While teachers often…

Offers seven effective learning activities for the first day of class. (MS)

Offers suggestions, based on textbook materials, for helping English-as-a-second-language students learn to write coherent English. (FL)

Suggests several short, manageable activities for teaching writing, such as writing cereal box copy, characterizations, test items, and obituaries. (JL)

Offers a writing exercise, based on a comic-strip theme, that teachers can use to relieve tensions between them and their students while developing students' expressive writing skills. (RL)

Notes the villanelle is one of English poetry's most demanding forms. Discusses two distinct ways in which a villanelle unfolds - as a satellite or as a snowball. Describes how the meaning of the repeating lines in a snowball villanelle change and increase with each recurrence. Presents exercises for teaching the villanelle. (SG)

Presents three teachers' suggestions for teaching grammar. Discusses how the first teacher suggests studying active and passive voice, the second teacher has students construct slang dictionaries, and the third teacher uses sentence combining that engages students and encourages carryover to their writing. (SG)

Describes rewriting examples of good writing into "ordinary" writing, to identify what elements of style made the original version so effective. (HTH)

Describes a writing exercise and discussion to help students broaden their concept of what constitutes comedy so that they may better appreciate Moliere's "The Misanthrope." (HTH)

Offers a 20-item list (put together by high school students) of features characteristic of Whitman's poems. Uses the list of features to write original poetry. Offers additional writing ideas for use with Walt Whitman's poetry. (MG)

Describes a technique used in an English composition course to encourage student experimentation with different language choices. The students are given a Chinese poem, along with a romanized pronunciation and dictionary translation of each character. They are then instructed to write a few sentences in English conveying the poem's message. (SED)

Suggests using poetry's short short forms for a methodical and rapid series of writing assignments that emphasize both careful writing at the sentence level and overall planning and respect for form. (HTH)

Lists writing exercises based on observations students can make in a shopping mall. Notes that the exercises are intended to become a springboard for study, description, conjecture, evidence, example, and innovation, and can be combined, expanded, or shortened. (EL)

Proposes a freshman composition class writing assignment in which students plan, conduct, and write up an interview of an adult friend or relative, focusing on one stage or event in that person's life. (RL)