Programs and Areas
First Year Writing Program
Teaching Resources: Style
Tried & True Home
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Transitions | Transition Derby | Commonly Used Transitions |
Balderdash | Sentence Structure Activity | Slang, Cliches, and Informal Language |
Another Informal Language Activity | Style Tightening Your Writing | Tailor It to the Class Needs |
All Purpose Writing Activity | Throat Clearing Phrases | Cutting the Fat | Word Choice
The All Purpose Writing Activity
Why this may be useful in your class: This activity brings together a lot of writing skills: organization, transitions, and sentence structure.What you need: Prepared writing prompts (maybe on an index card).
Timing: There’s no way around this: it takes a lot of time, probably a good half hour.
What to do:
- Divide your class up into groups of four – any more than this and the activity gets even more difficult.
- Distribute an index card to each group with a writing prompt on it. You can make these prompts cover different kinds of writing: for example, I might give a group a card that says, “Write about a family doctor that is retiring after 35 years of work.” Another group might have a more expository prompt, like “Write about what it takes to be a successful student at OSU.” Good prompts make this activity work – so try and come up with things that will be funny/interesting/challenging.
- Tell students that they are to compose a piece of writing on that topic. The catch is that every sentence of their piece must use a new letter of the alphabet (think acrostic poetry).
- Allow students to try this in a number of ways – they can try using the letters in sequence, or they can cross off letters as they go along.
- The initial composition takes a good twenty minutes. After they think they are done, tell them they have five minutes to revise their piece. In their revision, they are allowed to combine some of their original sentences and separate paragraphs, etc. Teacher then moves students as a large group to consider ranking their lists and models how to move from lists to interpretation. [15 minutes]
- Have groups share their final product (if you offer them an extra point on homework for using the letter “x,” things get really inventive).
Have an idea for Tried and True? Send it to fywp@osu.edu!
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