Students practice writing detailed, sensory-rich descriptions by framing a small piece of nature and freewriting about it. From this minilesson, students can develop a variety of types of writing.

Students examine a letter of the alphabet from all angles, creating image pools of original metaphors that they then turn into poems.

Using a hypothetical situation, students generate arguments from opposing points of view, discover areas of commonality using Venn diagrams, and construct logical, audience-specific arguments to persuade their opponents.

This lesson uses the "1984" Macintosh Commercial to introduce students to dystopian characteristics. Students analyze techniques used in the commercial and identify the comments that it makes about contemporary society.

Clang, clash, or tinkle? Students explore the use of onomatopoeia in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Bells" before choosing their own sound words in response to specific sounds.

Draft letters ask students to think critically about their writing on a specific assignment before submitting their work to a reader. This lesson explains and provides models for the strategy.

Students analyze the lyrics to Cole Porter's "You're the Top!" and then update them to include current "tops" in pop culture.

Students explore how active and passive voices are appropriate to different audiences. They examine online resources, and then draw conclusions about verb use, which they apply to their own writing.

Students analyze stylistic choices and grammar use in authentic writing, focusing on the use of the semicolon in Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail."

Students use their own poetry to analyze syntax, imagery, and meaning in a one-sentence poem by a canonical author to decide what makes it a poem.

Students are challenged to find citations that support details about the characters, plot, or themes from a text.

This minilesson guides student in using the PQP technique—Praise–Question–Polish—to offer concrete and useful peer review feedback.

Students often question whether a punctuation mark goes inside or outside the quotation marks, especially when writing dialogue. This lesson helps students identify the conventions and apply them to their text.

Students learn about paragraphing conventions in dialogue by revising their own writing.

Students will be introduced to the term alliteration and create a headline poem consisting of 25 words that contain at least three examples of alliteration.

Did she walk, skip, amble, dance? In this minilesson, students explore connotation by acting out and revising the simple sentence "She walked into the room."

Students examine familiar car names for underlying connotations then proceed through a series of steps, increasing their control over language, until they select words with powerful connotations in their own writing.

Students review the basic conventions for using quotations from literature or references from a research project, focusing on accurate punctuation and page layout, then apply the conventions to their texts.

Students manipulate sentences from books or magazines to examine changes in meaning and parts of speech.