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)

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

Teachers teach literature to help students expand and develop their image-making powers, "to imagine, conceive, fancy, picture," to think. To get students involved in literature, especially poetry, Robert Frost's poem, "The Witch of Coos," is particularly useful because it is so immediately accessible. In order to help engage…

With a central theme of how people create a means to communicate reliably, and based on language-making exercises that touch students' imaginations, this book aims to interest students in language and how language is made. Since students like codes and ciphers, the book begins with secret writing, which is then used to reveal the foundation of…

To aid in the understanding of "cases" for writing (defined as highly focused situations in which students assume a role that demands writing to specific audiences and for utilitarian purposes), this paper begins by outlining the problem case faced by the author: to present a convincing argument for the use of the case approach to composition. It…

Describes a six-phase writing assignment for ESL students to help them grasp the concept of an audience beyond the writing instructor. (HTH)

Describes a writing assignment that leads students to see the complexities of cause and effect relationships by having them analyze a complicated court case and decide who is right and who is wrong in the case. (FL)

Examines the sentence-based pedagogies that arose in composition during the 1960s and 1970s (the generative rhetoric of Francis Christensen, imitation exercises, and sentence-combining) and attempts to discern why these three pedagogies have been so completely elided within contemporary composition studies. Concludes that this erasure of sentence…

Presents step-by-step instructions to help developmental writing students write a cohesive essay by combining individually written paragraphs. (HTH)

Provides a step-by-step approach to teaching students the elements of poetry, such as similes, acrostics, metaphors, and odes. Copies of handouts are included. (HTH)