The Writer’s Craft

 These exercises are designed to help students master some of the ways writers work with language, character, time and audience.
 I have also included an activity for helping students to deal with writer’s block.

The next three sections develop leads, focus and description in more depth.

In the section on Leads, Endings and Titles I have included both expository material and activities.   Often these exercises appear to dramatically improve the quality of student pieces.  The beginning carries so much impact.

Focus is notoriously difficult for beginning writers, but so essential to good writing. The section on focus contains exercises and ideas for working with their own papers.

I have also included a section on description of places and people.   Some of the poetry activities dealing with people might also be appropriate for working with description.