Sunday, September 12, 2010

Classmate Story Assignment

Round 1
Monday, Sept. 13

•    Spend about 15 minutes interviewing your assigned classmate. Be sure to get basic biographical info, such as age, hometown and family members. Try to get your classmate to volunteer something revealing about herself or himself.
Pay attention to descriptive detail, such as appearance and mannerisms.

•    As you conduct your interviews, try to develop a good human-interest angle as the central theme of your story. (Look at the list below, copied from “Vieth’s Six Secrets,” for examples of the universal themes that make people stories more interesting.)

Round 2
Wednesday, Sept. 15

•    Begin writing a minimum 300-word feature story about your classmate, with a top and billboard based on your human-interest angle. (If you got much information from your classmate, you may find that it’s easy to write a longer story.)

•    Re-interview your classmate as needed to double-check information and fill in details.

By midnight Sunday, Sept. 19

•    File your story in the Classmate Story dropbox of D2L. Email a copy to your classmate. (That means you’ll need to get her or his email address.)


Good writing connects with one of the big themes that resonate with readers:
-turning points                -epiphanies
-life and death                 -love and loss
-winning and losing        -alienation and reconciliation
-triumph and tragedy      -underdogs and long shots
-heroism and villainy      -kids and animals

No comments:

Post a Comment