Frakenstories & The Writer's Practice

V: Other writing experiences

This section explores a variety of creative and practical writing experiences that help students develop versatility as writers. These experiences often feel more playful than academic, but they build important skills that transfer to other contexts.

This experience introduces proposal writing through personally relevant requests:

  • Identifying and addressing audience concerns
  • Building persuasive cases
  • Anticipating and addressing potential objections
  • Writing with appropriate formality

You can use this game to focus on the form of proposal arguments or also explore register and tone.

This creative experience helps students understand how humour works through a few commonly used comedic frames: 

  • Treating something weird as normal
  • Treating something non-human as human
  • Exaggerating or reversing social and power dynamics
  • Expressing hidden thoughts
  • Putting characters or behaviour in an inappropriate context

This experience helps students handle emotional writing effectively. Key learning opportunities include:

  • Expressing feelings clearly
  • Understanding cause and effect in conflicts
  • Using appropriate tone
  • Making specific requests

This companion to the conflict letter focuses on resolution:

  • Understanding others' perspectives
  • Finding common ground
  • Proposing solutions
  • Maintaining relationships

Together, these letter-writing experiences help students understand different approaches to difficult conversations.

This reflective experience develops self-reflection:

  • Cause and effect in personal decisions
  • The role of context in choices
  • Constructive self-talk
  • Balancing criticism and support

This experience helps students develop supportive writing:

  • Understanding others' situations
  • Offering constructive suggestions
  • Supporting advice with reasoning
  • Writing with empathy

This creative experience develops character voice and perspective using another common comedic-writing frame: the surprising interior monologue. The three versions offer different approaches:

  • V1 Extraordinary doing the mundane: explores comedic status reversals
  • V2 Fish out of water: explores comedic context shifting and adaptation
  • V3 Inner life of an object: explores comedic boundary crossing

This experience develops observation and characterisation through the format of a magazine or website profile:

  • Detailed description
  • Using metaphor effectively
  • Structuring biographical information

A variation on the Profile experience, this experience is about character description in the service of celebration and commemoration:

  • How to capture character through details
  • The role of specific examples in tribute
  • Balancing personal and public perspectives
  • Writing with appropriate emotion

This experience is about developing an appreciation for words and language.

We've modified a handful of famous quotes, replacing well-chosen words and phrases with more generic alternatives.

In the game, players should try to identify one or more words they think sound vague or weak and replace them with a stronger choice.

The point is not to restore the original quote, instead:

  • Develop an instinct for weak choices
  • Develop the courage and skill to make stronger choices

The real value is in the discussion after the game:

  • Did anyone make any interesting choices?
  • To what effect?

The original snippets

R1

She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together. (J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye)

R2

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart; I am, I am, I am. (Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar)

R3

Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given out randomly, stupidly. (Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed)

R4

The curves of your lips rewrite history. (Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray)

R5

There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. (William Shakespeare, Hamlet)

Teaching tips

  • These experiences are more personal than academic, but they all develop the same core skills: observing, analysing, expressing, and reflecting.
  • Many of these experiences work well as community builders.
  • Consider collecting successful student examples that demonstrate different approaches to these tasks.
  • Use the profile and tribute formats with subject-specific content (historical figures, scientists, literary characters)
  • Adapt the letter-writing experiences for different scenarios relevant to your subject
  • Use the monologue format to explore different perspectives on course content
  • Apply the sentence revision experience to subject-specific writing
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