English Language Arts Grades 10-12

In the wide world of writing prompts, the options are slim for creative nonfiction writers. Even the relevant prompts are often jumbled together with essay and fictional prompts. But this list is all 100% creative nonfiction.

Creative writing prompts are a great way to get students' imaginations flowing and to help them develop their writing skills. Prompts range from simple questions which ask students to describe a character or setting, to more complex prompts that challenge students to explore a particular theme or idea.

Practice reading visuals with frequent photo writing prompts. This blog offers guiding questions and visual prompts to get you started.

It’s tough to grade and offer feedback on creative compositions without feeling like you are rejecting the work a student has poured their soul into. This blog offers practical tips to navigate verbal and written feedback in your high school classroom.

Explore flash fiction writing and analysis with these lesson ideas. The author offers a link to the unit bundle, but the free examples and teaching tips are excellent place to start.

When prepping for the English Diploma, this video may help your students to understand the variety of formatting choices they have in drafting a personal response.

Use this tip sheet to introduce personal response writing to your students in order to help them structure their 5 paragraph essay format to include critical analysis, personal reflection, and universal connections. This document includes a 10-1 exemplar.

If rhetoric is the art of persuasion, then the rhetorical analysis essay analyzes how an author or speaker creates opportunity for persuasion in their text. This post shares engaging speeches, advertisements, and essays with paired text analysis recommendations.

Literary criticism is the way we analyze, evaluate, judge, and talk about literature. Literary lenses allow readers to focus on particular elements of a text when reading. This blog post categorizes the four main types of literary lenses and how they are used to create nuanced textual analysis.

25 pages of exercises, worksheets, evaluations, and suggestions to assist you in teaching playwriting as a part of your curriculum. Help your students put pen to paper in their own creative works!

This link focuses on the reading comprehension strategies, such as the exploration of connotation and denotation of key words when analyzing a quote in a close reading passage.

A great guide for students to learn about how to create an awesome poster presentation.

Students can test their spelling skills with this activity. They listen to the sentence and spell the word that should appear in the box.

This post helps students to structure quote analysis paragraphs using an anagram to remember each step. It includes an example from Macbeth.

Learn the difference between readability and legibility, then you can make sure your work is both.

Discover how point of view can transform a story, and find out how to choose between first, second, and third person in your writing.

Have you ever presented an idea to a group, and it’s met with utter confusion? What’s going on here? Katherine Hampsten describes why miscommunication occurs so frequently, and how we can minimize frustration while expressing ourselves better.

This video provides some tips and tricks for adding humor to your writing. Learn about traditional "commedia dell'arte", noticing the details and finding the funny in the "ordinary".

What makes a good horror story? Hideous monsters and fountains of blood? This video offers a review of the horror and mystery genres and then offers tips about creating suspense in your writing.

This video shares tips for using descriptive language to make your fiction come alive. How can you engage your reader in your story?

This TED video provides some great tips and examples for writing strong introductions and thesis statements for your essays. The Think section tests your understanding; Dig Deeper provides additional resources.

Enjoy this video exploring how "anti-social" skills (like eavesdropping and muttering) can help you develop characters and dialogue in your writing.

A quick overview of the grammar rules that high school students should understand and incorporate in their writing.

Free online writing curriculum facilitates effective instruction by helping teachers engage students through modeling, scaffolding, practice, and feedback. Note: Teachers will need to create a free classroom to access.

Browse these grammar-related podcasts.

This is a lesson about some key writing skills, using zombies as an interesting comparison to nominalizations (nouns made from other parts of speech).

This video takes an interesting look at grammar rules. Do we need them? Learn about the argument between linguistic prescriptivists and descriptivists — who have two very different opinions on the matter.

Is the Oxford comma (or serial comma) really optional, or is there a universal rule? This video explores both sides of the Oxford comma debate.

How many different verb tenses are there in English? It isn't as simple as past, present and future. This video explains grammatical aspect and how each of those time periods actually divides further.

How many different verb tenses are there in a language like English? At first, the answer seems obvious — there’s past, present, and future. But it isn't quite that simple.

It may seem like the semicolon is struggling with an identity crisis. It looks like a comma crossed with a period and we’re confused about how to use them properly. Emma Bryce clarifies best practices for the semi-confusing semicolon.

How do metaphors help us better understand the world? And, what makes a good metaphor? Explore these questions with writers like Langston Hughes and Carl Sandburg, who have mastered the art of bringing a scene or emotion to life.

What do the dialects of "English" spoken in dozens of countries around the world have in common? This video traces the language from the present day back to its ancient roots, showing how English has evolved through generations of speakers. (description)