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
Would You Like to Be a Cryonaut?
In “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, four old friends who have wasted their lives are given water from the supposed Fountain of Youth. After they drink the water, the three men begin to fight over the woman, whom they all had fancied in their youth, and in their tussling, they knock over the vase with the precious water.
Dr. Heidegger learns his lesson. He is finished with trying to make people young again, but the three old folks come away from the experiment with a different idea. They want to travel to Florida to drink from the original Fountain of Youth. You can read the whole clever story here.
By the way, I’ve drunk from the Fountain of Youth in St. Augustine, Florida. The water tastes like it has sulfur in it (stinky-egg scent). And I can assure you that it has not worked.
Nathaniel Hawthorne never could have imagined a real company that freezes people to somehow revive them later. Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, freezes bodies in the hopes of (more…)
Write about the Impossible in a Sci-Fi Story
Jules Verne, considered one of the fathers of science-fiction (sci-fi), liked to write about going places people couldn’t actually go to or had not been before.
He wrote about exploring the core of the earth in Journey to the Center of the Earth. His fantastic tale 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea takes readers deep, deep into the ocean in a submarine, a fairly new invention. From the Earth to the Moon shoots adventurers to the moon in a metal rocket long before space travel had been invented.
Sci-fi writers like to (more…)
What Is Freedom?
Melba was fifteen years old when she was chased by men who wanted to hang her. It was the first day of racial integration in Little Rock, Arkansas, in September 1957, and fighting for her life was just the first of her year of torture at the hands of students, parents, teachers, and members of the town.
Tortured
And when I say torture, I mean (more…)
A Time Capsule
If you had been alive during the time of the American Revolutionary War and had the chance to secrete something for others to discover centuries later, what would you have put into your box?
It turns out that two famous men from that period created a time capsule and placed it inside one of the cornerstones of the Massachusetts State House in Boston in 1795, and the box was recently found. You can read more about how it was found here.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, was honored to open this special time capsule to find out what was in it. Here’s a list of items found in the brass box: (more…)
Describe Characters by Their Clothing
In a story, clothing can be the author’s way of telling us what kind of character we’re reading about.
What are they wearing?
Judging real people by their clothing might not be too smart, but authors rely on readers to judge characters based on their characters’ clothing.
For instance, someone in a black leather jacket with a skull embroidered on the back and chains hanging from a pants pocket is going to be very different from someone in a light aqua-colored jacket carrying an umbrella with pink flowers on it. We make assumptions of people according to their appearance. (more…)
Should He Be Arrested . . . Again?
So, Roger gets arrested over 20 years ago for grand theft, but he serves only five months of his five-and-a-half-year sentence. Why?
Because he escapes.
And now, a fugitive from the law for 22 years, he is found in a neighboring state, living with his wife who has brain cancer. And he’s arrested again.
Jennifer Mayfield, who took care of Roger’s wife for a few months, thought it was strange that Roger didn’t have a driver’s license or a bank account, but now she understands why. (more…)
