Describes how literature teachers can enliven Shakespeare's "Macbeth" by performing Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking episode (Act 5, Scene 1) with their class. Provides a lesson plan to set up and discuss the performance. Notes that this lesson lets students view a Shakespearean play from both theatrical and academic perspective. (MM)

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)

Describes how teachers can use drafts of their own writing to teach revision. Uses several examples from the author's fiction and professional correspondence to illustrate the following: (1) differences between revision and recopying; (2) fleshing out a description; (3) reflecting audience needs; and (4) revising for clarity of purpose. (MM)

Presents an assignment to help students understand the necessity of "seeing" a dramatic text as they read it and the necessity of considering that meaning in the theater is created on many different levels that often vary from one play to the next. (SR)

Describes an exercise in which students learn to recognize cliches by locating them in a poem and generating them in a class discussion. Notes that by teaching students to recognize unimaginative and ineffective language in the work of other writers, they can learn to avoid it themselves. (MM)

Describes several activities using postcards as writing prompts at all classroom levels. (MM)

An approach to teaching the writing of poetry is presented in this brief article. AUTHOR'S COMMENT (excerpt): A poet's purpose is to amuse, to instruct, to embellish truth, or to vitalize dull reality. Poets compress, using the minimum number of words to gain the maximum effect, yoking seemingly disparate ideas into metaphors, creating poetic…

Describes an exercise which promotes awareness of the recent movement to eliminate gender-biased noun and pronoun usage from the language. Provides instructions on how to change sexist noun and pronoun usages into non-sexist language, and lists several ways to make writing gender neutral. (MM)

Describes a role-playing activity to help students effectively extract information from an oral source, as in an interview. (MM)

Suggests exercises, activities, and materials teachers can use to help students increase awareness of the nonverbal aspects of communication. (RB)

Describes three exercises which use creative spelling in student-generated advertising, poetry, and dialect. (MM)

Describes an exercise designed to help student writers expand beyond writer-based prose by having them write for a particular magazine or newspaper audience. (MM)

Presents an assignment in which students use their study of poetry to think critically and write creatively. Describes how students synthesize inferences about a poem to write character monologs based on the poem. (MM)

Describes a writing assignment (to be carried out while in the process of writing a research paper) in which students critique either their best or their worst sources. (SR)

An approach to writing for junior high through college writing and literature classes is presented in this brief article. AUTHOR'S COMMENT (excerpt): Writing from literature, instead of only about literature, can provide creative approaches to the study of literary works. The activities listed can be done in conjunction with the study of a single…