This piece introduces methods -- textual interventions -- for teaching close reading through film literacy. Editing is the mechanism that creates meaning out of moving images. To unlock a film's visual "secrets," we must break the sequences of editing; move its hinges; reread and revise the cut.

Athletes in all sports and at all levels of performance keep training logs, journals, or team notebooks as one more way to learn extensively about their sport. Such organizing, planning, and reflection can play a pivotal role in an athlete's life. What's more, as communication tools, athletes' writing has the potential to be especially helpful for…

Place-based writing affords students an opportunity to write meaningfully about themselves, grounded in a place that they know. Place-based writing is versatile and can be additive--taking just a week or two within a semester of different projects--or transformative, if positioned as the theme for an entire course. If students can learn to write…

In this article, the author talks about the use of punctuation and describes a study that confirmed her growing sense that all students need exposure to and instruction on the full repertoire of punctuation. In an attempt to assess how much of the eleventh graders know about the way professionals use punctuation, all teachers at Webster Thomas…

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…

In this article, the author shares how she envisioned and created a writing assignment for a ninth-grade English course. The writing project is a class novel comprised of short stories, one written by each student. In the writing assignment, seniors compile their favorite writings from any class in any year of high school and write reflections…

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

Recounts the diverse reactions elicited by a college writing teacher when he asked his students to compose using his copy of Keats' life-mask as a resource. Discusses how the life-mask acted as a stimulus, turning in-class writing into an exciting and useful composition experience. (NKA)

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

Suggests several short, manageable activities for teaching writing, such as writing cereal box copy, characterizations, test items, and obituaries. (JL)

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)

Explains how student-constructed "aliens" were used to generate writing and to encourage the development of writing skills. (JL)

Offers a writing exercise, based on a comic-strip theme, that teachers can use to relieve tensions between them and their students while developing students' expressive writing skills. (RL)