More Alternative Writing Assignments

These may seem more appropriate to high school than to college writing courses, but I am more interested in having students enjoy writing (and reading) than in impressing me with their mature academic style. (And I continue convinced that such assignments can develop critical thinking skills, and can be incorporated into more formal critical writing.)

• Students can write letters from Pip to Estella and from Estella to Pip (or emails or text messages);
• they can write diary entries for any character they know enough about (and if their knowledge is limited, they can write a single diary entry, say, by Mrs. Pocket at the end of the day when Pip is introduced to the Pocket household;
• they can write a dialogue between Matilda in Mister Pip and Pip, imagining them as contemporaries in one world or the other;
• they can write a humorous narrative of a performance (a play, a movie, a TV show), as Pip does in Chapter XXXI, in which he sees Mr. Wopsle in Hamlet.