Fun and Games

One thing I have been trying to do this semester is to introduce my students to rhetorical devices, and to improve their sentence structure. Along these lines, we've been doing some writing exercises and some language arts games/activities. Some of the more successful ones have been:

Varying sentence structure: I had them all write as many three-four word sentences as they could in 3 minutes. They then read them aloud, and we all agreed that they sounded very stilted. They spent another three minutes writing the longest run-on possible, then shared that. We ended up agreeing that sentences need to be in between the two extremes, and writing them in a variety of ways/lengths sounds best when read out loud.

Apostrophe (borrowed from another TA): I told them about apostrophe as a rhetoric device (not the punctuation)., gave them examples, and then had them write and share their own.

Collaborative Writing: I asked each student to take out a sheet of paper, and start a story. We then passed the paper to the right, and the next person continued the story, passed it to the right again, and so on. The stories, when read out loud, resulted in gales of laughter!

Irony: I explained irony, and gave examples. They wrote their own ironic sentences and shared them with the class.

We have also worked on:

• Comma splices
• Run-on and fragmented sentences
• Coordinative conjunctions
• Hyperbole and understatement