The biggest disease in North America is busyness. – Thomas Merton
Today I was asked: “How do I write a book review?”
Here’s a quick trip about what I found:
My first stop was at Amazon. With each book is a snippet of a responses from readers/buyers/sellers. The purpose of the reviews are simple – take a few seconds to write a sharply worded sentence or two and recommend [...]
Peruse the articles linked below. Find your own sources.
Defend your own position, hyperlink your sources. Contribute to the discussion in the STJ forums. Write your own post in your blog. Trackback here.
From New York…
When Olivia Lara-Gresty saw the metal detectors at the entrance of Middle School 54 on the Upper West Side, she turned around [...]
The life which is unexamined is not worth living.
- Plato
Write a story in which a protagonist undergoes a transformation in the search for self. Have your character encounter basic questions about his/her identity.
Consider using the following images:
This exercise is simple: write a poem about a family member meeting a famous person. All of us have such incidents embedded in family history or folklore: the day Dad shook hands with Ike in France; the time Mom spilled coffee on Elizabeth Taylor in a pizza parlour in San Mateo; the night Aunt Dottie [...]
Take a news article (from your RSS aggregator, for example)
Take some scissors
Print the article
Get a small bag (pencil case, ziplock, lunch bag)
Cut the article into bits, one word per bit.
Put the bits into the bag
Shake gently(the bag, duh!)
Take out each bit one by one and copy conscientiously in the order each bit left the bag
The [...]
Use pencil crayons to draw a picture of your mother’s kitchen.
Put the oven in it, and also something green, and something dead.
Write a poem about your mother’s kitchen.
You are not in this poem, but some female relation – aunt, sister, close friend – must walk into the kitchen during the course of the poem.
Completed poems, [...]
Thanks to a few bloggers for helping me work out the bugs in the microcontent code. Movie, music, and video game reviews appear to be the most popular. I still haven’t, yet, found a sure fire method of aggregating all the reviews – POGE. The FREEoutputthis.org looks promising.
Anyway, for the time being, trackback your microcontent [...]
Students can collect news headlines from a variety of RSS sources using their blog as a news aggregator. Writing about the news is one of the more common uses of a blog throughout the blogosphere. Bloggers blend fact and opinion, rant and satire, sarcasm and criticism, objectivity and subjectivity, style and substance. By reading and [...]
The snowflake blog deals out an assortment of writing ideas. Students can pick from a variety of prompts. Try not to make any two posts the same.
Send a trackback.
For a while now, every STJ blogger is faced with a “Random Idea” each time the begin a new post. Well, there should be dozens, hunerds, towsands of such posts in our blogosphere by now.
Trackback your “Random Idea” posts here.
