Looking for a performance assessment that asks individuals to demonstrate their competency in writing about informational text? Use Frederick Douglass' essay "On the Dred Scott Decision," and an excerpt from Abraham Lincoln's 1857 speech...

Class members practice their writing skills by completing a prompt about maturity. They develop a constructed response about something they once thought was important, but may not be as important now. 

Nearly every president has had the opportunity to name a nominee to the United States Supreme Court. But what makes someone an ideal candidate to become a Supreme Court justice? High schoolers test their prior knowledge about the...

No matter how difficult high school writing may seem, college writing presents challenges of its own. The fourth in a series of 24 handouts from The Writing Center at UNC breaks down the expectations for college writing. Scholars learn...

Organization is key in essay writing. The two organizational charts included in this resource model the block approach and the point-by-point approach to organizing a compare and contrast style essay. After examining the...

There's a lot riding on good writing! Often, an application essay is the difference between acceptance and rejection. As part of a series on specific writing assignments and contexts, a handout helps scholars craft the perfect personal...

Turn your passive readers into active readers with an engaging lesson on reading informational text. Focused on compare and contrast structured essays, the activity prompts elementary learners to jot down questions and think-aloud...

In this basic essay-writing worksheet, learners are guided through the first parts of the writing process. They are then on their own to complete the essay.

Music is a universal pleasure, but writing about it can be a little trickier. An informative handout discusses common types of music writing assignments that one might encounter in a college-level course. Individuals read about musical...

Johnson C. Montgomery’s controversial plea for American social isolationism, “The Island of Plenty,” launches an in-depth study of the structure and logic of the essay. After responding to a series of questions, individuals craft a...

Art analysis might help uncover some of life's most puzzling questions, such as the mystery behind Mona Lisa's smile. The handout, from the Writing for Specific Fields series, is particularly useful for those interested in pursuing art...

When it comes to writing, cliches are as old as dirt. A handout on tired phrases provides examples of cliches, as well as a description of the negative effects they have on a paper. Writers discover specific words and phrases to avoid,...

Evaluative or Analogical? The wolf in the story of "The Three Little Pigs" and the wolf in "Red Riding Hood" represent what can happen to the unprepared. Despite his defeat in the end, the Big Bad Wolf is a good example for kids because...

Clear up common questions about commas with this handy resource! Useful as a reference page as well as a grammar activity, it presents six different rules for comma usage, including fanboys, lists, and parenthetical words and phrases. A...

Persuade your writers that crafting arguments is not that difficult. They only need to follow the steps outlined in this resource.

In this literature worksheet, students respond to 6 short answer and essay questions about Buck's The Good Earth. Students may also link to an online interactive quiz on the novel at the bottom of the page.

While the writing prompt in this activity is geared toward an adult because it mentions a morning run and coffee afterwards, the idea is one that can be altered for use with younger students. This short essay activity could be used with...

In this solar system worksheet, students explore a web site called The Nine Planets, to refresh their knowledge of the solar system, and to research new facts about Uranus. They answer three questions about Uranus, write an essay about...

After reading Ernest Hemingway's well-known novel The Sun Also Rises, print these study questions for your class. There are 10 questions listed, and some require more than just basic recall. There are compare and contrast questions and...

In this writing transitions worksheet, students practice using transitions as they write 7 sentences using in addition, additionally, plus, moreover, furthermore, and as well.

The 2016 election is over, and now it's time to dig in to some data! An activity revolves around data gathered from the First Vote Project in North Carolina wherein thousands of students voted. After diving in to the data using...

In this economics worksheet, learners answer a variety of fill in and short answer questions, draw a diagram to illustrate the circular flow of economic activity, and write short essays to address prompts.

In an ideal world, sentences in a college-level essay should feature a variety of sentence types. In reality, most papers stick to simple and compound sentences, two of the types a handout on sentence patterns discusses. Part of a larger...

In this online interactive philosophy instructional activity, students respond to 10 short answer and essay questions about Sickness Unto Death by Kierkegaard. Students may check some of their answers on the...