Students learn to express their ideas with clarity and effectiveness during classroom discussions, as they learn to listen and respond to the voices of others. Communication unites even the most solitary work of thinking, inquiring, investigating, and creating with the outside world; it makes all work a social act that directs students to a variety of constructive purposes. Whether a dance, a biological study, a musical composition, or an historical analysis, ultimately the student’s work must be shared, communicative, and legible.
Create an informational zine. What writing choices can you make so that the information is complete, but concise? How do images aid in the communication of your message? How would you distribute the zine?
Use the same data set and create two visualizations of the data that tell different stories about your findings. What are the techniques or manipulations that you used? How can we most accurately represent data?
Write a description of an artwork/performance/composition/poem/etc. in great detail. What do you think it means? Write a reflective paragraph about the difference between what you see and what you have interpreted.
Pose a question or problem to the class, and give each student a short time to think about the question and write down some possible solutions. Have the students pair up to discuss their thoughts. After the students have had an opportunity to discuss in small groups, come back together as a class and ask the students to share their ideas.
In any reading, find three impressive sentences that communicate complex ideas. Type them. Then, choose one of those sentences and write a paragraph about how it is constructed and how its structure affects its meaning to make it so powerful.
Choose one powerful sentence. Try to diagram the sentence; if you don’t know how to diagram it, draw it. How does the form of the sentence communicate to the reader? How can you turn the sentence into another kind of visual representation?
Take a section of a reading and read it out loud with the class in a new way—too loud, too soft, in a chipmunk’s voice, with an echo, etc. Then, read it the “correct” way. What expectations do we have from a text and how it should sound? What happens to you as a reader when the tone of a text changes—deliberately by the author, or not?
