In the English classroom, narrative writing is often separated from the work of reading literature or used merely to coax reluctant students into discussing textually relevant topics. This article discusses a close writing activity, Image Explosion, that engages students in narrative writing that brings attention to the smallest details of…

Offers four reasons for using the case approach in introductory technical writing courses and a sequence of six cases that can be used. (RL)

Suggests the value to modern students of paraphrasing and describes exercises in paraphrasing. (DD)

Presents a simple classroom exercise that transforms a remote future need for grammatical competence into a more practical, immediate, and useful skill. (HTH)

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

Proposes that a systematic program of summary writing may be particularly effective tool for helping students overcome egocentrism by requiring them to focus objectively on someone else's ideas. Describes a program of summary assignments that foster dialectic thinking. (HTH)

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)

It may be suggested that one's reflection on psychology's past and present state is an important part of finding one's identity within psychology. The facilitation of each individual student's quest for identity within psychology may be taken as a fundamental goal of the theories and history of a psychology course. This quest may be stifled if…

Describes a series of problems based on transformational grammar which are helpful in teaching students how to write. (DD)

Describes efforts and results of teaching students to write free verse by recasting old poems, e.g., taking a poem heavy with rhyme, meter, and inversions and modernizing it freely using some of the techniques of free verse. (HOD)

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 a practical freshman composition writing assignment in which students composed career profiles of notable alumni, which were subsequently used by the college career planning and placement office. A sample letter and profile are included. (HTH)

Lists eight ways to develop a topic for a composition. (DF)