One way to elicit good writing from students is to expose them to great literature and have them write about the attributes they share with a character, or about the experiences they have had that parallel those in a work of fiction, or about how a work of fiction compares with real "life." Using James Joyce's "Dubliners" as a…

The film "Pieces of a Puzzle" (part of the series "Writers Writing" that was coproduced by WNET and Learning Designs and televised by WNET in 1985), helped students become better writers and facilitated the discovery of material and techniques appropriate to academic writing. First, students were introduced to reader response…