Writing Contest Supports

Hello Friends,
For those of you participating in APEC's "Writing Contest 2016," we are providing some quick exercises to help your students get started.

Short Stories:

• Take a real story from your life.  Since the writing contest theme is "adolescence," think of something that happened in your teenage years.  Change three things about the story.  For example, have it happen to your friend and not to you.  Have it happen in another, different, setting.  Have something change about what happened (ask yourself "what if...").  Change the gender of one of the characters.  Having a real incident to base the story on helps to give you something to work with.
• Draw your story as a comic strip before writing it.  Conveying the story in pictures helps you to focus on action rather than explaining.  Think of your story as scenes from a movie. Draw the key scenes. Use the comic as a guide in your writing, but feel free to go where the writing takes you. 

Poems

• Try a list poem.  Make a list of something related to your theme.  For example, "things I wish I had known before I became a teenager,"  or "bad advice that adults give teenagers,"  or "things every teenager should know."  Making lists of objects is also helpful, such as "things I carry with me every day."  For this last one, think beyond objects as well.  Perhaps you carry the responsibility for your younger siblings or the weight of your parents' expectations for you... 
• Use the "Five Easy Pieces" activity on this blog or the other poetry activities. 

Essays

• There are two main kinds of essays:  argument essays and personal essays.  For the argument essay, you need to think about something you have an opinion about.  One way to start is to think about your daily life and make a list of things that make you angry or annoy you.  For example, I get annoyed by the lack of respect for traffic rules when I am trying to walk in the street.  Once you have your list, think about an item that applies to most people your age.  For example, you might be annoyed that adults give you advice that they don't follow.  Next, think of some examples of what you are talking about.  It helps to make a map or outline of your ideas.  Start your essay with a little story to capture the reader's interest.  What made you think of that item on your list?  In each paragraph explain your reasons, giving supporting details. Tell your reader what you think in the concluding paragraph. 
• A personal essay is a little different.  In this kind of essay, you tell a story to illustrate a point.  Think of some experiences you had that taught you lessons.  Make a list. Choose one.  Describe the experience in as much detail as you can.  Conclude by showing the reader what you learned from the experience. 

I hope these suggestions are useful. Please comment with any questions you have. 

Color Poems

 Begin by choosing a color.  Write a list of everything you can think of associated with that color.  This can include things that are that color of course, but try to move beyond this to feelings and concepts associated with the color, such as green being associated with jealousy for example, or blue with peace.  You can use the five senses, asking students to speculate on what their color would smell like or taste like.  Select and arrange these ideas into a poem.
As you revise the poems, have students eliminate repeated words and substitute more specific words for vague ones.

Here are some examples of color poems to share with students:

"White" by Mark Strand

"Is White a Color?" by John Matthew

White by Meg Petersen

the color of cold,

the sliver that settles in the snow queen’s heart,

the faint smell of bleach rising up from tired hands, and

crisp school uniforms, hospital corridors,

sheets on a line and most underwear, the straps of the beaters

against my sons’ dark skin.

streaks in an old woman’s hair

vampires and clown faces.

White, the skin which betrays me

the history I wear and am never without,

the legacy of privilege, aura of power

and imposition, the presence of all

color, emerging from a spinning color wheel

reflecting back all the light in the spectrum

                                                                                                                      

Aglow with purple under the blackest of lights,

as if revealing its own deepest secret,

how it is not what it seems, more than fresh

diapers on a mother’s shoulder or the erasure

of winter which reduces the world

to chiaroscuro.  It is all color and it is nothing—

the paper before the poem. 

 And a simpler example, for younger children: 

Green

Green Green is apples, markers, and cool. 

Green is the taste of vegetables. 

Green smells like grass and rain. 

Green makes me feel envious.

 Green is the sound of a lawnmower and a sigh.

 Green is a garden, forest, and a swamp. 

Green is renewal. 

Green is beginning again. 

Writing a poem as a group exercise

Hello Friends, I am going to post some poetry exercises on this blog leading up to your work on the writing contest through APEC.   This one is one you can work on with your whole class.

For this exercise, each student should bring in an object with an interesting history.  All students should have an interesting object they can talk life into and which might interest and inspire other students in the class. Each student presents his or her object and the objects are passed around while the student explains the object.  (If your class is too large, you can do this in smaller groups).
Once the storytelling is over, the students make a poem using the objects in the manner and order they choose. One way to do this is to write lists that combine the names of the objects with something about them.

This exercise helps students with oral language skills as well and is a wonderful way for students to get to know something about each other and build community in the class.


A variation of this kind of exercise might be to do a simple list poem.  A student can propose a category such as "Things Found in my Backyard."  "Things I want to do Tomorrow," "Things I Regret,"  "Things in your pocket (or purse, or wallet)" Each student makes a list of as many things as they can think of.  Here is an example poem with a list of things found in pockets:

SONG FOR THE POCKETS by Gary Soto

They carry the spoon that unearthed another tin spoon,

A magnet furred in iron filings,

A shag of lint.

They carry fiddle-neck and arrow-face foxtail,

Aa harmonica grinning with rust.

 The salt that forgot the palm it was rubbed from.

They carry the key whose door was burned,

A rattle of seeds capsuled in foil—

All that was lost in the street raised by its own rules.

Here is a simpler example:

What Bugs Me

When my teacher tells me to write a poem tonight.
When my mother tells me to clean up my room.
When my sister practices her violin while I'm watching TV.
When my father tells me to turn off the TV and do my homework.
When my brother picks a fight with me and I have to go to bed early.
When my teacher asks me to get up in front of the class and read the poem I
wrote on the school bus this morning.

Writelab

You can receive feedback on your writing in English online with this useful tool:
writelab.com

You will need to register, but then you can try out the tool for free.  If you register as an instructor, you can register a class as well.

Let me know if you would like help with this. I am waiting for this to be available in Spanish. :)

Generous Reading

This is a wonderful resource for what we have talked about in terms of responding to student work:

http://scholarcommons.sc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=edcs_facpub

I would love to discuss it with any of you.

Editing Tips

Editing Tips:  Use a list of these tips with students to help them to edit their own and each other's work. 

1.  Watch for places where you have unintentionally repeated words or phrases. Use resources to look for other words you could use.  

2. Substitute more specific words for vague generic words.  Use “Jeep” instead of “car”.  Look for where you can eliminate words like “thing” and substitute a more specific word. 

3. Work to eliminate the verb “to be,” (is, are, was, were) especially in description.  Substitute action verbs.  

4. Look for ways to combine sentences.  For example.  “He does not smoke. He does not drink.”  Or “He is rich.  He is very unhappy.”

5. Streamline transitions—Try to avoid phrases like “Saturday rolled around” or “We could hardly wait for Saturday to roll around.”

7. Try to recast or combine sentences which begin with “There is” or “It is”.  “There are three levels of teams in my school which anyone can try out for.”
8. Eliminate filler phrases such as “I think” or “In my opinion” or “Needless to say” 
9. Vary your sentence length. Look for places where you have a series of choppy sentences and see where they might be combined.  If you have a series of long sentences, consider adding a short punchy sentence to break up the rhythm and catch your reader’s attention. 
10. Look at your paragraphs, and evaluate points of emphasis.  Your best sentence should be the last one in the paragraph.  Put your next best sentence first in the paragraph.  Bury the boring stuff in the middle of paragraphs.  Try to vary paragraph length. If you have a great sentence buried in the middle of your paragraph, try to move it to the end, or consider a paragraph break after that sentence.
11. Use figurative language (similes, metaphors) to make your writing more vivid. “Those sugar-brown Mobile girls…are as sweet and plain as buttercake.”
12. Add participles (ing phrases and ed phrases) to elaborate more on crucial sentences.  “The soldier, gripping the handle of the gun tightly, sweating in the desert heat, feeling utterly lost and alone, pushed his way into the abandoned building.”
13.  Add appositives (naming phrases) to elaborate on your sentences:  “My mother, the woman who once told me that boys were just naturally smarter than girls, now claims that gender played no part in the way she treated my brother and me.”
14.  Add personification through the use of verbs and phrases… “The mountain threatened to engulf us.”
15. Experiment with adjectives out of order.   “Sunday shirts will billow on hangers from the doorjamb, stiffly starched and white.” 
16. Use sensory details; expand beyond what you saw to what you heard, smelled, etc. 

"I am" poem

The "I am" poem is a way to create a poem while practicing grammatical structures that students can use to enhance their writing.

Come up with three objects you could use to represent yourself in the poem

Choose one. 

Come up with three pairs of adjectives to describe the object, think back to the metaphorical relationship to yourself as you do it. Write them as [adjective] and [adjective]

Experiment with the order of the adjectives.

Come up with three “ ing phrases” that express action (present participial phrase) What are three things this object can do?  Write this as an "ing phrase".  For example, if my object were a baseball, some possibilities might be:

• landing in the catcher's mitt
• sailing over the left field wall
• bouncing in the dirt in front of home plate

Come up with three noun phrases or descriptive phrases to describe the object (appositive)

Again, using the example of the baseball, these might be literal or metaphorical as in the third example here:

• a white stitched sphere
• a solid unforgiving orb
• the test of my abilities

Choose one or more from each list you have made to create a poem in this pattern:

I am a _________________

Adjective and adjective

Participial phrase

Appositive

End with a summary phrase that relates to the previous parts of the poem. 

Of course, feel free to change this up any way you want, to use more of any kind of phrase you want, etc.  The point of the exercise is to increase vocabulary, provide tools for working with writing and help students to think metaphorically, but sometimes the poems themselves are quite good.