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 series of related approaches to teaching poetry and helping students to overcome their phobia of it. Suggests that students gain from discussion of vocabulary, the poem's speaker and his or her perspective, and word choices in the poem. (TB)

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 a fun outdoor assignment whereby secondary school students form into groups of four or five and learn about the importance of narrative setting by drawing on sidewalks with chalk. Reviews the five basic elements of setting: temporal, geographical, cultural, historical, and environmental. (TB)

Describes a two-day class plan in which students learn about performance and production aspects of a Shakespearean play and become sensitive to the multiple readings that can exist in a text. (SR)

Offers an exercise to help students understand the difference between summarizing and paraphrasing and how both practices can result in plagiarism if the original source is not cited. Explains how the exercise uses Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address." (TB)

Shows how students may play the role of the advice-giving columnist as a means to learning about the fallacies of logic. (TB)

Presents a class activity which uses laminated pictures from art calendars, museums, and other sources as a stimulus for writing. (SR)

Presents an in-class literature exercise to help students understand that there may be more than one "right" reading, more than one right answer, more than one right way of understanding literature. (SR)

Describes a writing assignment based on a "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode in which an alien sacrifices his life so two cultures can come together. Provides questions for students to answer during the viewing of the episode. Suggests a writing assignment (and several variations) in which students create their own alien. (TB)

Presents a class activity in which student describe and classify music as an introduction to writing classification essays. (SR)

Offers a model lesson that uses television commercials to foster in students a more sophisticated awareness of audience. (SR)

Describes two writing assignments that may be used to make Shakespeare more approachable and understandable: first a paraphrase of a passage, and second a memo to an actor interpreting the same passage. (TB)

Describes a series of exercises designed to help students of technical writing to see the virtues of revision. Suggests that students may learn from finding sections of their own textbooks that they can revise both linguistically and graphically. (TB)