Describes using the beginning of a Western story in a story completion exercise to stimulate writing. (TJ)

Describes a final writing assignment in which students themselves must propose a writing assignment and rationale for future use in the classroom. The assignment forces students to examine what they have learned in the course and gives the teacher some insight into what has not been taught successfully. (HTH)

Describes an exercise in which students cut out T-shirt drawings, sort the T-shirts into groups, and "write" a classification essay by pasting the T-shirts on sheet of paper. The T-shirts in each group become the examples used in one body paragraph of the classification essay. (HTH)

Describes an activity in which students must invent graffiti that might have been written by one of the characters studied in the class's literature assignments. (HTH)

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

Describes an assignment in which students are taught to develop poetry using the ideas and words found in newspaper or magazine stories. Includes model poems. (HTH)

Describes a method for encouraging students to develop a reflective/exploratory essay. Students are asked to freewrite or brainstorm on several famous quotations, exploring the disparity between the appearance and the reality. Students then write essays on some of the ideas conveyed by one of the quotes. (HTH)

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)

Summarizes a series of four class sessions in which students write and rewrite an analysis of advertisements together. (TJ)

Explains an exercise in which logical relationships are isolated in order to help students discover how to choose their material for paragraphs. (TJ)

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)

Offers a nonverbal prewriting strategy, writer-based sketches, intended to help students turn their thoughts into words. (MS)

Describes a writing exercise useful for students who have already shown some facility in writing about personal experiences and that emphasizes the narrowing of scope and time in a reminiscence and developing it with detail in order to make it more interesting for others. (HTH)

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)

Describes five prewriting activities for courses that emphasize writing and deemphasize discussion of literature. The activities focus on organization and theme statement so that students think about every possible subject, theme, and approach. (HTH)