• “What Do You Mean I Have to Write a Poem?”

Uses oral history interview clips and brainstorming to produce two class poems in order to help overcome students’ reluctance to try writing poetry themselves.

Judy Ferrand—Wor-Wic Community College

• De-mystifying Style: Helping Students with Sentence Variety

Offers exercises to involve students in assembling scrambled sentences, combining short sentences, and writing a group paragraph with several constraints in order to force students to think about sentence variety.

Sharon Walsh—Wor-Wic Community College

• Teaching Grammar through the Back Door: Using Games, Induction, and Less Correction to Help Improve Student Skills

Presents methods for teaching grammar concepts indirectly through games, inductive reasoning, and less feedback on written work.

Larry Blasco, Wor-Wic Community College

• Every Word Counts: Helping Students Achieve Concision Authentically

Uses the Washington Post’s contest “Life Is Short: Autobiography as Haiku” as an exercise in revising for perspicuity.

Rachel Rowe, Salisbury University

• Writing for Fluency: Developing Scripts for Multiple Voice Poems and Readers’ Theater

Incorporates writing into the reading, listening, and speaking dimensions of performance activities to improve fluency.

John Wolinski, Salisbury University

• Developing Characters and Critical Skills through Dialogue

Provides students the means to compose a creative project focusing on character and dialogue while evaluating characters as they are developed through dialogue in literature.

Ken Farrell, Salisbury University

• You Need Writing!

Employs real-world writing activities to teach students that writing is important in virtually all occupations, and that the basic techniques involved in composing academic papers-focusing on purpose and audience-apply to all types of writing.

Robert Hoffman, Salisbury University

• Compare and Contrast:  Read It Then Write It to Understand It

Presents a method for facilitating students' reading comprehension;  helps students to understand the relationships between ideas, to arrive at valid conclusions about what they've read, and to communicate those conclusions through speaking and writing to a learning community of peers.

Holly Schaefer, Wor-Wic Community College