Suggests ways of designing poetry writing assignments so that students are motivated to practice a particular writing skill. (RL)

Presents an assignment that helps technical writing students develop skills in preparing literature reviews. (RL)

Describes writing exercises that release students' imaginative powers and help their news writing become fresher and more descriptive. (RL)

After discussing J.R.R. Tolkien's "Father Christmas Letters," fifth- and sixth-graders undertook a class project to answer second-graders' letters to Santa Claus. (SJL)

Contends that the subtleties of good writing are best learned by imitating proper models. Notes that the trick to using imitation in writing instruction is knowing how to assign imitations and differentiate them carefully from plagiarism. Offers exercises as suggestions and student writing as illustrations. (RL)

An argument for using various letter writing assignments to help students develop their writing voices. (RL)

A detailed account of how a high school playwriting course was developed, with a list of 20 exercises. (RL)

Describes the use of oral traditional stories to teach sentence cohesion to students of English as a Foreign Language. Oral stories, when written, resemble the pupils' own work. By turning the former into a cohesive narrative, students can improve on their own stories. Temporal cohesion of the stories facilitates this practice. (PJM)

Proposes that an awareness of writing as a process is the necessary basis for building effective writing programs, provides examples of activities that promote more creative writing samples, and expresses the need for emphasis on different purposes and audiences for writing assignments to broaden young writers' styles. (HTH)

Discusses the ineffectiveness of one-phase marking, i.e. direct correction of errors by the teacher, and the effectiveness of two-phase marking in which the teacher makes the student aware of an error but does not indicate what the error is. (CFM)

Suggests a series of exercises designed to help students see the value of concrete writing, to help give new life to metaphors, and to encourage concrete evaluations of abstractions. (TJ)

Discusses a technique for helping students see the value of revision by using a previously written and revised composition as an illustration. (TJ)

Mind and mood pictures help students "see" reason in their writing. (Editor)

Presents a three-part exercise that deals with poetic excess: heightened exaggeration of deliberately conflicting ideas. States that part 1 deals with hyperbole, part 2 with paradox, and part 3 with combining hyperbole and paradox in a single poem. Gives examples of students' poems using the technique. (PA)

Describes three poetry-writing exercises that encourage students to break from linear, normal thinking patterns: answering questions that have no answers; describing impossible objects; and contemplating infinity. (MM)