Among the features characterizing human language is creativity, the ability to produce an infinite number of sentences with a finite number of rules. What is expected of creativity is non-conformity, violation of rules, and challenges to accepted convention. Words may be used to activate possible contexts. Most textbook sentence examples do not excite the imagination, but when their potential is exploited, they can take on the character of literature, adding lexis a little at a time and shaping context. Classroom procedures to exploit the potential of the sentence might include combining randomly selected sentences to stimulate manipulation of structures, arranging sentences with little apparent contextual possibility into a narrative, or asking students to supply expressions to make connections between semantically diverse sentences. In this way, students can be guided into fashioning fiction from what at first appears to be a list of random and unrelated sentences. Poetry can also be produced by this means. (MSE)