Goucher College Writing Assignment Bank

Laura Orem - "20-word Limit Exercise"

While this writing exercise can be done completely in-class, I’ve found it works better to break it up over 2 classes with a journal entry homework assignment in between.

I usually do this as my first assignment for the semester.

Handout - Anne Sullivan letter dated April 5, 1887

Helen Keller, "The Day Language Came Into My Life"

        Read the two selections in class. You may find it helpful to provide some background for the students. They usually have heard of Helen Keller but don’t know many details of the story - for example, that Anne Sullivan was only twenty years old when she became Keller’s teacher, or that Keller graduated with honors from Radcliffe at a time when few able-bodied women went to college at all.

Discuss the two selections, addressing the following:

How are the two accounts alike in detail? In particular, I like to look at how each discusses Helen’s "transformation" from a wild thing into a child capable of affection and of anticipation.

How does the tone of each account differ? (This helps bring in the concept of audience.)

        Draw their attention to paragraph 3 in the Keller selection, which uses striking visual imagery to describe her isolation. How is Keller able to use language to describe something with which she would have had no personal experience?

        Now I shift gears a little bit, and ask them to think about how language gives shape to our own lives and experiences. I ask them to think about their earliest memories, however fleeting. Usually these come from around age 2 or 3 - or when we move from being passive receivers of language to active users of language. (You will probably have a few people whose memories come later, or some wise guy who will claim to remember being born, but the majority will go with the flow).

        Have them do a brief (10-15 minute) in-class writing assignment in which they describe, in as much detail as possible, this first memory. Let a few people read their entries (this is to lull them into a false sense of security).

5. Here’s where the fun begins. Give them a 2-3 page journal entry as homework in which they are to describe a memory that has great significance to them (a moment when they were most frightened works well), giving as much context and detail as possible. Then tell them they can only use a vocabulary of 20 words to fulfill this assignment. They will look at you in horror. Don’t worry about it - you are an English teacher and there is method in your madness. Remind them the entry must be 2-3 pages minimum and that you get very cranky when people don’t do their homework.

6. Next class, ask them to read their entries. This will be excruciating, because of course they will not have been able to do the assignment as you have given it. You will get a lot of gibberish and much complaining about how mean you are (although I have gotten some interesting poetry-esque stuff on occasion).

Now, ask them to do an in-class entry on what it felt like to do this assignment.

They will have much to gripe about.

8. Then you get to lead them in a lively discussion the importance of language - how words, the right words, matter, how without words it becomes impossible to think and reason, let alone communicate.  Once students see where you are going with this, the discussion really takes off.   They think you’re sneaky, but it gets them thinking about language and how they use it, and how frustrating it is when their access to it is limited.