Thursday, November 19, 2009

Simple as A, B, C...

Could you?

Recently I asked my expository writing students to write a twenty-six word passage that made sense. It’s not so hard; my students are smart. The challenge, however, was that each word had to follow the alphabet in alphabetical order. The passage could be more than one sentence but only twenty-six words and must follow the alphabet perfectly.

Here are some student examples:

A bee cuddles dandelions extravagantly, fighting gnats; hellishly injecting juice killing lots. Multitudes near old pines quietly reconstruct sad teachings, undividedly veering with x-gaming yellow zebras.

A bloody communist decides exploiting fascism gets him into juvenile klans learning most notably of people quitting stereotyping then using violence with Xanax yearning zombies.


Could you best these entries? I’ll give you five days to submit your entry. The winner will receive blog kudos and will be asked to share the strategies with readers of The Clem, The Blog, The Truth.

5 comments:

Rebecca said...

Your assignment was very interesting. What a great job your students did. I'm going to write one with my daughter tonight. Thanks for sharing.

Unknown said...

My stab at it with only 15 minutes of thought ... so far.

At best, current dilemmas evoke fear getting hapless individuals jostled. Killing legalism motivates not only placated, quiet, reserved students. The urgency vibrates with xenophobic youthful zealots.

If I win maybe you can hook me up with another book when summertime rolls around. "The Book Thief" was a great selection last time around.

Peace,
Bo

JBrandt said...

Bo, even if you don't win give, The Princess Bride a read. Yes, it was a movie. Yes, it was a mild spoof on the fantasy genre. Yes, the book is better, more subtle and just as funny as the movie.

Unknown said...

I never knew the movie was based on a book. I will definitely check it out. Your selections haven't let me down so far.

Peace,
Bo

Julianne said...

Artlessly Barack consumes dollars encouraging future generations' hasty investments, jostling kids' liberty meticulously. Needing obscure propaganda, quilted rhetoric shadows transparency, undoing victories won, xeroxing your zillions.

I just couldn't sacrifice words like "propaganda" and "transparency" for punctuation!