Here are some activities that I will use in my 10th and 11th grade creative writing class this summer for TRIO/Upward Bound.The strategies teach concise writing and are based on Twitter. However, the ideas can easily be adapted for other platforms including Facebook status updates or text messages.
SOURCE: Less Is More: Using Social Media to Inspire Concise Writing
1) Personal Writing: Students write a series of Twitter-esque personal “essays” (140 characters maximum, including spaces and punctuation). Topic ideas include the school year, life lessons, relationships and personal goals. Each one can be stand-alone, or each post can be part of a series. They might do this, for example, for personal writing or in the context of developing college essay ideas. They then develop one or more selected posts into a longer piece. Afterward, debrief: How did starting off by writing brief expressions of their ideas contribute to their writing process?
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3) Poetry: Students read the Twitter poems by Billy Collins, Claudia Rankine, Elizabeth Alexander and Robert Pinsky. They then write their own original “Twitter poems” or rewrite a classic poem or one of their own poems in 140 characters or fewer. They can also look further into the history and impact of brief poems, like Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” and William Carlos Williams’s “So Much Depends.”
4) Creative Writing: Students write pieces inspired by so-called Twitter novels and cellphone novels, either by writing the equivalent of an original story or novella 140 characters at a time, or by “crowd-sourcing” the work, by having each student contribute a line, in turn, to a class novel.
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RELATED RESOURCES
From The Learning Network
From The Learning Network
- 10 Ways to Develop Expository Writing Skills With The New York Times
- Lesson: The Plot Thickens?
- Student Opinion: Do You Use Twitter?
- Bloggingheads: Twittering Away
- City Room: A Life on the Streets, Captured on Twitter
- Magazine: I Tweet, Therefore I Am
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