Given the two-sentence skeleton of a news story about a car theft/joy ride, budding writers create their own version of the story varying diction and sentence structure to heighten interest and complexity in their writing. Resource...

To demonstrate their ability to comprehend complex text, individuals analyze the details, syntax, and diction John Steinbeck uses in a passage from The Grapes of Wrath to reveal the develop and evolution of Mae's character.

Readers take part in three activities after reading Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. To understand the importance of diction, class members analyze Stevenson's characters' language to denote their social status. After...

James Hurst's short story "The Scarlet Ibis" provides eighth graders with an opportunity to sharpen their literary analysis skills. After a close reading of the text, class members highlight and annotate parts of the dialogue and...

Grading essays after reading a novel written by a lyrical master (think Nabokov, Morrison, Chabon) is a deflating experience. Why can’t your student’s display the same skill in diction as your favorite writers? Because you did not use...

Information, inferences, and innuendos. Text and subtext. Class members examine telegrams exchanged between President John F. Kennedy and Alabama Governor George Wallace, studying both what is stated and what is implied by the...

Primary sources are valuable for understanding the context of historical events, but the diction and dialect in these documents can be difficult to understand. Middle and high schoolers participation in a transcription process in which...

How was Edgar Allan Poe able to create "intriguing, memorable, and lasting literature"? To answer this question, learners analyze the syntax, diction, and characterizations in Poe's poems and short stories and compare the impact of these...

To demonstrate their ability to comprehend complex text, ninth graders are asked to craft an essay in which they use evidence drawn from "Letter From Birmingham Jail" to analyze how Martin Luther King, Jr. uses rhetorical devices...

Alice Walker's poem "Women" provides ninth graders the opportunity to demonstrate their ability to identify how a writer's choice of syntax and diction contribute to the development of the theme of the work.

Emily Dickinson's "Because I could not stop for Death" provides high schoolers with an opportunity to practice their critical thinking skills. They examine the images, diction, rhythm, and rhyme scheme the poet uses and consider how...

This activity may have writers evaluate short compositions, but their subjects are quite tall: great Americans. Pupils read one another's compositions and closely examine how specific phrases and diction contribute to shaping American...

After a close reading Marge Piercy's poem "Barbie Doll," class members craft an AP®-style explanatory essay in which they analyze the diction and other figurative literary devices the poet employs to deliver her commentary on modern...

Chapter 10 of Malcolm X's Autobiography introduces readers to Elijah Muhammad's teachings. Discussion questions focusing on syntax and diction draw attention to how Malcolm X's perspective on Mr. Muhammad changes.

Readers examine the rhetorical devices Haley uses in chapter 8 of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, paying particular attention to the diction and syntax and how these choices reveal changes in Malcolm X's point of view.

To underscore the importance of precise diction and sensory details in narratives, class members examine two statements to determine which is more effective and significantly impacts the reader. Individuals then examine their college...

“. . .different men often see the same subject in different lights. . .” but the great orator Patrick Henry used all the skills at his command to craft a speech to convince listeners to see things as he did--that liberty was worth dying...

“The Lord’s Prayer” provides the text for a study of how language changes. Using the provided link, young linguists examine the prayer in Old and Middle English and compare how the diction, syntax, and phonology have evolved over the...

How can word choice affect a political speech? Middle and high schoolers examine the text of the 1999 State of the Union Address, and then determine how newspaper articles and television reports describe and analyze the event. Use this...

"Now is the summer of our happiness/Made winter by this sudden, fierce attack!" Luke Skywalker meets Hamlet in a 10-lesson unit based on Ian Doescher's William Shakespeare's Star Wars: Verily, a New Hope. Using Star Wars® as source...

Why is it important to use precise language? Participants explore this question in the fourth activity in a series of 15 on effective instruction. Perfect for all content areas, the activity promotes appropriate language choice through...

Identifying the tone of a piece of writing or the author's attitude toward the subject matter can be difficult for learners. Simplify the process with a lesson that begins with skits, moves to songs and their lyrics, and then to passages...

Here's a must-have guide for instructors who use Robert Frost's poems in their classes. The 24-page guide focuses on poems included in Frost's first two volumes of poems, background information on the poet, and what Frost thought was an...

How figurative language affects the tone and meaning in Chapter Three of Christopher Paul Curtis' Bud, Not Buddy is the focus of a series of exercises that ask readers to locate, record, and analyze Curtis' word choices.