Description | Exposition | Narration | Persuasion | All
Want to inspire your teens to write? Could you use some engaging writing prompts that won’t put your teens to sleep? You’ve come to the right place!
You’ll find prompts for opinions, descriptions, story writing, current events, prompts that are really tutorials in disguise, and much more. Complete instructions are included with each prompt.
Looking for tutorials on essay writing, proofreading, and so on? Interested in writing prompt bundles that span many grades? Click here.
Find prompts for your middle school students here.
Thanks for visiting the High School Prompts page. If you have a writing prompt you would like to submit, please contact Sharon Watson.
“You can’t wait for inspiration.
You have to go after it with a club.”
— JACK LONDON
Courage: Show, Don’t Tell
“You can never cross the ocean until you have the courage
to lose sight of the shore.” –Christopher Columbus
Show, Don’t Tell
When an author wants to let readers know that a character is, say, courageous, she doesn’t write, “Chris was courageous.” Instead, she sets up a situation in which the character has to act bravely, even if he or she feels fearful, showing just how courageous the character is.
Christopher Columbus showed courage by doing something—crossing an ocean when many believed he would fall off the edge of the earth into oblivion.
“Show, don’t tell” is an important element of writing stories. You don’t want to insult your readers by telling them how characters feel or what a character is like. You want to show them by (more…)
Paragraph Chart: High School
Many students tell me that after they do the hard work of coming up with an idea, they do not know what to put in the paragraph or even how to write the paragraph.
Is this an issue for you as well? Could you use a little help in this area?
{Looking for the MIDDLE SCHOOL version of this tutorial? >>}
In-text Citations for High School
You’re writing your essay and everything’s going great until you realize you need to let readers know where you got a certain fact. You aren’t using a bibliography, footnotes, or works cited page because this is just an essay, not a report or research paper.
You don’t want to plagiarize. Putting someone else’s fact or idea in your essay without any citation would definitely be plagiarism.
What are you going to do? (more…)
What Comes to Mind When You See This Picture?
Once in a while, it’s interesting to look at a picture and write whatever comes to your mind—no guidance, no rules.
So, here goes . . .
Proofreading: It’s Not Just for Cheerleaders
Proofreading. What a pain.
You finish your essay and think you’re through with it, but, no. Now you have to proofread it.
It turns out that writing and proofreading are two separate skills. In fact, they use two different parts of your brain and should be done at different times.
To take this a step further, when I proofread, I (more…)
Stained-glass Butterflies and How to Write a How-to
Students will follow along as I guide them through my experience with making stained-glass butterflies. As they read, they’ll be learning how to write a how-to and then insert transitions into the essay to move their readers easily through the process.
Suitable for students in 5th – 12th grade.
My stained-glass how-to essay
Last week I attended a class on how to make stained-glass butterflies. You know, the kind you hang up on a window with little suction cups.
My stained-glass butterfly and my mom’s. Hers turned out better than mine!
The teacher was very clear on how to do each step. We practiced cutting glass first, listening for the “hiss” that showed we were scoring the glass correctly with our cutters. After we had cut a line and a circle (both of which I messed up), he moved us to the next step.
I chose what I thought would be a simple butterfly design and found out how wrong I was. (more…)
