Richard Kerridge writes here about his efforts to help students to overcome an experience that was once his own: of being labelled low-ability, with all the attendant lowering of expectations that this entails. He recognises the merits of rigorously ensuring that all students should be able to access their entitlement in terms of what they are…

Illustrates how writing exercises involving epitaphs may be used to teach brevity, restraint, and lucidity. (DD)

Discusses the use of exercises that help students learn to write poetry. (HOD)

Designed to encourage students to discover that grammar merely represents the patterns that exist in language, this book presents lessons on 19 grammar points: nouns; pronouns; verbs; subjects; capitalization; end punctuation; commas; sentence fragments; run-on sentences; contractions; possessives; quotation marks; adjectives; adverbs;…

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

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

Describes the "Chinese Menu System" of student instructional units based on the ideas of James R. Moffet being used by teachers in the Columbus, Georgia, area in which students select learning activities from categories constructed around a single topic. (JL)

Discusses the historical significance of letters to the editor. Suggests guidelines to teach students the skill of writing letters to the editor as a constructive method of sharing views. Asserts that this kind of letter writing encourages participation in the democratic process. (MS)

Describes a classroom experiment in which tenth grade students read and analyzed works of romantic fiction and then wrote their own romantic novel synopsis modeled on their readings. (DD)

Suggests a way to stimulate students' interest in writing that involves learning trivia about famous people and integrating it into classroom lectures in the form of anecdotes. (SRT)

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)

Presents opposing views on the wisdom of teaching student writers to write for an "audience." (JL)

Insists upon the importance of poetry and provides a procedure for introducing both students and teachers to the writing and appreciation of poems. (JL)

Describes an approach for teaching "The Diary of Anne Frank" to secondary school students, focusing on historical and emotional preparation, and writing prompts for the play. (MM)