A short instructional video on the use of transitions to tighten up student writing.

A handout/tutorial on identifying and avoiding the overuse of qualifiers in one's writing.

Detailed handout on maintaining style in writing, including avoiding wordiness, cliches, and maintaining verb tense.

A handout/tutorial on the importance of word choice in writing including wordiness, redundancy, and cliches.

In this lesson utilizing knowledge of sentence structure, students will read Lewis Carroll’s poem, Jabberwocky, focusing on the tone of each stanza and the variety of words that could be considered ’nonsense.’ By focusing on the adjectives, students will then replace those words with different ones in order to create different tones and point of view.

Expose middle school students to a first taste of Shakespeare from the angle of the ghost story and launch into the subject of verbs. In this lesson, they learn how Shakespeare uses verbs to move the action of the play. Students then distinguish generic verbs from vivid verbs by working with selected lines in Hamlet's Ghost scene. Finally they test their knowledge of verbs through a crossword interactive puzzle.

In this lesson, students identify and analyze folktales. They learn the characteristics of folktales and use them to evaluate existing tales and to create original tales of their own. Students apply the writing process to strengthen writing skills and to develop creativity.