High School Writing Project Ideas
English is a mandatory subject every year of high school. Writing is an essential skill to learn and becoming successful at it takes practice. Students can best hone their writing skills by trying their hand at a variety of writing forms and structures from persuasion to creative writing to fiction.
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Essays
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Essays are typical high school writing assignments. They are usually part of the curriculum and come in a variety of forms: definition, argumentative, expository and narrative. (see reference 1) Teachers can assign topics on everything from current social issues in the news to novels or poems studied in the class. Students can research sources to support their arguments and broaden their knowledge of a given topic.
Story Writing
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Story writing is an engaging and creative writing assignment for students. Students can learn the formal elements of a plot and plan their story according to a standard plot graph. They can also write character sketches and establish relevant themes for their story. Teachers can teach a lesson on literary devices, which the students can also plan for in their story. Classmates can edit each other's stories. Writing the story in pairs adds a challenge to the assignment.
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Chapter Rewriting
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If students are studying a novel, teachers can have them rewrite a significant chapter from the perspective of a character other than the protagonist or narrator. Students can consider ahead of time the personality and values of this character and what his thoughts, feelings and reactions to events and circumstances would be.
Research Projects
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Teachers can tailor research projects to almost any subject. Students could research a famous person's life, a historical event, a literary movement or a topic of their choosing. Students can present their ideas to the class in a formal speech or with visual aids.
Narrative Voice Writing
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In this assignment, the student picks an inanimate object and writes a short paper from the perspective of the object. This creative writing project forces students to stretch their imaginations. Teachers can require the students use a minimum of literary devices or new vocabulary words.
Newspaper Articles
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Students can learn how to write a newspaper article using an inverted pyramid, a format the includes more information at the beginning and less towards the end. (see reference 2) Students can base the article on current issues or happenings at the school. Working in pairs or groups simulates working on a real editorial team. The teacher can put all the articles together in to one newspaper to distribute or sell around the school.
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References
Resources
- Photo Credit writing image by Petro Feketa from Fotolia.com
