Idea for writing teachers

I stumbled upon an interesting website, unphotographable.com, today and I realized that students of any age can practice the same idea as a lesson for showing, not telling and the use of imagery.

In a nutshell, the website gives a daily paragraph, "This is a picture I did not take of..." followed by a vivid description of what we would be seeing if there was an actual image.

Another follow-up lesson might be to have students work in pairs to write a paragraph, then trade paragraphs and draw what their partner was trying to describe. It should help the original writer to see what could have been added to help their reader visualize better.

Tags: imagery, not, paragraph, show, tell, writing

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Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on February 22, 2009 at 3:25pm

I like it.

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Permalink Reply by Kathy Cook on February 22, 2009 at 4:46pm

Chris,
Thanks for sharing the website and the ideas. It would make a great lesson!
Kathy

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Permalink Reply by Jennifer Perino on February 22, 2009 at 7:02pm

Thanks for the link Chris...great idea!

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Permalink Reply by Brian Carmichael on February 22, 2009 at 10:19pm

This looks really good! Thanks for the suggestion!
Brian

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Permalink Reply by Barbara on February 23, 2009 at 5:37pm

I am SO using this ... love it.

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Permalink Reply by Barbara on February 23, 2009 at 5:58pm

You could also assign different story elements based on the prompt to different students or groups: 1. describe the setting 2.who is the character and what is his/her background? 3. write some dialogue between this character and someone else 4. further the plot - what happened next?