Several practical suggestions or guidelines for deriving objectives in traditionally difficult curriculum areas (written and oral communication, fine arts, social sciences, and humanities) are presented in this paper. The author believes that educators do not know how well they can define important, teachable objectives in these areas until they try. The guidelines include: (1) if you merely want to provide the learner with "nice to know" information or content, rather than to teach a skill that the learner can apply in many situations, then you probably do not need objectives anyway; (2) when deriving objectives, it is useful to consider the basic stages a real writer, artist, or actor goes through to come up with a good performance or product and develop a scheme for each stage; (3) objectives should be written so that they define the essential elements or characteristics of a product or performance in a clear, recognizable way; (4) it is helpful to first develop actual samples of the product or performance you want the learner to accomplish; (5) when considering objectives for school-based programs particularly, one must recognize that schools must limit objectives to the time that is available; and (6) objectives can be substantially improved through the curriculum developer's attempts to teach objectives, either personally or through products. Examples of objectives in four areas and a structure of an advanced expressive language program are given in the appendixes. (SK)