Teaching Poetry as Music: An Audio Assignment
This assignment has students engage with poems as sound. By recording poems students explore a poem’s rhythm, word sounds, and other musical qualities.
Tagged: writing lessons
Four Points of Good Workshopping
Over decades of running and participating in writing workshops, I’ve found that the best workshops happen when they include simple but effective guidelines for responding. This Four Points of Good Workshopping handout has served me well for creating a community of writers. It helps authors take in critiques and it...
Finding the Words 2: The “Eight Words” Poetry Generative Exercise
In FINDING THE WORDS 1: BLACKOUT/ERASURE POETRY I presented a lesson on how to get out of your word rut and discover new vocabulary through that form. In this lesson, you’ll discover new words by playing the “Eight Words Game.” The game also works as a poetry generative exercise.
Tricks Research Writers Use to Find Primary Sources
Overview Researching primary sources is time-intensive. As I like to say, “there are no shortcuts.” But there are tricks research writers use to gather information. Here are four of these researching tricks that can help you more quickly and efficiently locate primary sources:
How to Use Sources More Critically
Overview Students using research studies often are unaware of how to apply critical attention to details. Yet some details of even the most complicated sources are within even the beginning research writer’s ability to analyze. How to Use Sources More Critically shows how you can and should question source data...
Making Claims in Research Writing
Overview A research paper, simply stated, is organized to support a claim, an assertion about the truth or falsity of something. So two of the several ways a research write-up can proceed is by stating that major claim, or thesis, of the paper near the beginning , or by first posing a research question the...
Finding the Words 1: Blackout/Erasure Poetry Generative Exercises
Overview Writers default. That is, without quite realizing it, we write using preferred words, preferred sentence styles, preferred voices. This means a universe of possibilities is not occurring to us during composition. So we need ways to break out of our habits, to find new words. Here is the first...