Presents a teaching guide for the novel "Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant," including questions for discussion and writing about individual characters and the novel as a whole. (HTH)

Describes an assignment for high school or college literature classes in which students focus on a particular character, answer a list of questions about that character, and eventually write an imagined yet realistic dialog with that character. Notes that this helps students grasp a character's complexity and depth. (SR)

Suggests that students need to become aware of the relationship between one's writing and one's intended audience and presents a way for students to make this analysis. (JM)

Suggests teaching characterization in literature classes by having students write an advertisement similar to the Dewar's scotch advertisement, based on each of the characters in the novel "Ordinary People." Examples are included. (HTH)

Describes a method for teaching several novels simultaneously to students in the same English classroom. Provides a list of questions to be answered by students at various stages of reading a particular novel. (HB)

Suggests having students write short summaries using the principles of the journalistic news "lead" to help them sharpen their abstraction skills. Includes samples of data blocks from which students would compose their summaries, kernel sentences from the samples, "kernel" kernel sentences, first draft summaries, and 30-word…

Presents two writing exercises for use by students working in small groups. Argues that such exercises relieve the loneliness of writing, as well as the anxiety that often accompanies it. (FL)

Offers an activity for use in helping students become aware of the importance of voice in writing and reading. (FL)

Provides an exercise for broadening students' understanding of what research is and why it is important. Shows how students can be taught the value of source materials as fundamentals of true research. Outlines a method of taking apart an expository article and tracking down its multiple sources. (HB)

Describes the various "affective filters" that inhibit basic writers from learning to write. Suggests principles for avoiding such inhibitions among basic writers. Claims that such principles are an effective way of fostering writing development among basic writers. (HB)

Provides an eight-day sequence of assignments to introduce the idea of the speaker or "persona" to a high school English class beginning study of eighteenth and nineteenth century literature. Cites works by Thomas Hardy, Jonathan Swift, and William Blake. (HTH)

Discusses using comics in high school and college writing and English classes to teach figurative language and other literary terms and techniques such as style and descriptive writing. Describes several activities and notes benefits of using comics in this way. (SR)

Describes an assignment that urges expository writers to pursue their own interests and create a fully developed prose project that they will be eager to share. (HTH)

Describes using the novel and television adaptation of Harriet Arnow's "The Dollmaker" in a cross-media approach to teach a unit on the problems of translating literature into film. Includes approaches for generating discussion of rural and urban values and weekly discussion and reading assignments. (HTH)

Provides a rationale for allowing students to write in journals that the teacher will never read. Suggests requiring students to write responses to their journal writing at the end of the semester, which would be shared with the teacher and the rest of the class. Includes a sample response. (HTH)