How Do You Make Friends?
Have to write a how-to essay? Choose a fun topic like how to make a friend!
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Change Nouns to Verbs for Clear Writing
Ever wonder why some writing is so confusing? Most likely they’ve choked their verbs and turned them into nouns. Make your writing clear with vivid verbs.
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How a Tiny Tick Almost Stopped Her
HIGH SCHOOL PROMPTS Angeli Vanlaanen has had it rough. When she was ten years old, she fell ill and continued to experience symptoms until she was twenty-four: headaches, sore muscles and joints, fatigue, fainting, blurry vision, and so forth. The diagnosis Still, she pushed herself to learn how to ice skate and snow ski. Her…
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High School Prompts | Middle School Prompts | Middle School Tutorial | Sharon's Blog | teaching aids | tutorial | Writing Prompts
The Enumerative Essay: Parking Spaces and Baseball
Enumerative essays, or partitive essays, begin with the number of parts (“There are nine ways to get to first safely”), and then each part becomes a paragraph in the body. The first paragraph in the body can explain how a hitter can whack the ball and get to first before anyone on the opposing team can catch the ball and throw it to first. The next paragraph can be about getting the hitter to first on a walk, and so forth.
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A Moving Description?
Aren’t descriptions those boring parts you always skip reading? Learn how to use movement in your descriptions to engage your readers and make it interesting.
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Wanted: Cowboy Poets
MIDDLE SCHOOL PROMPTS Heifers. Cowpokes. Cottonwoods. Hullabaloo. What do these words have in common? Well, if you were a cowboy poet, you would know! The National Cowboy Poetry Gathering is held in Elko, Nevada, each year. Singers and poets compete, attend workshops, and dance. Watch Randy Rieman recite his humorous poem about being “throwed” from…
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When Is a Sweet Pea Not a Sweet Pea?
MIDDLE SCHOOL PROMPTS Gardeners love to receive their new seed catalogs in the middle of winter. It gives them something to dream about and plan for. Not only are the photos of flowers and vegetables beautiful and inspiring but their descriptions are as well. Here’s the description of the Erewhon Sweet Pea from a Burpee…
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Maya Angelou and the Smile
HIGH SCHOOL PROMPTS When Maya Angelou, author of the moving autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, was eleven years old, she was reunited with her birth mother, whom she hadn’t seen in eight years. Young Maya was unhappy. . After two weeks, her mother still had not seen her smile. Here’s the exchange…
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Do You Have a Spice Clock?
MIDDLE SCHOOL PROMPTS When you want to know what time it is, where do you look? Most likely, you tell time by clocks of some sort. But what if you told time by flowers, birds, or scents? Huh?
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Opinion Writing: Professional Matchmakers
SHARON’S BLOG Students who have a hard time writing about wars, politics, gender issues, and other heavy topics really warm up to writing opinions, so let’s give them something engaging to write about. After all, everyone has opinions. It’s Just Lunch is a dating service for businessmen and businesswomen. According to their Website, they’ve provided…
