Make it Interesting/Make me Want to Read it: Catchy Openings
Purpose: This exercise works to develop strong first sentences and unique voices in student writing.
Description: This is a voice activity demonstrating the fact that many student pieces could use more “personality” and that many of them sound exactly alike. This exercise is an attempt to help students enliven writing. This would work well with an early draft of a personal narrative or short story, but could be easily adopted for a research assignment.
Suggested Time: 30-40 minutes
Procedure:
Pull first sentences from some of your students’ papers and first sentences from published sources and mix them up. None of them are identified.
Put them on the overhead and the students rank the sentences from most interesting to least interesting. Usually, their sentences are at the bottom of the list, and often, many of the writers do not recognize their own sentences.
After pointing out which sentences originated where, we then discuss why they ranked the high sentences as high as they did. We discuss voice and how the writers seem to get right into what they are writing about.
Then challenge students to rewrite opening sentences 3 or 4 different ways. After they feel like they have successfully done this, they share their sentences and discuss which work better or worse and why, than the original sentence.
As the final step of the exercise, have students rewrite introductory paragraphs to maintain the “more interesting” voice throughout. As a requirement for the next draft, they must sustain that interesting voice throughout the entire paper, demonstrating audience awareness.
Sample first sentences:
“The fellas and I were hanging out on our corner one afternoon when the strangest thing happened. A white boy, who appeared to be about eighteen or nineteen years old, came pedaling a bicycle casually through the neighborhood” (3). –Nathan McCall, Makes Me Wanna Holler
“He came to kill the preacher. So he arrived early, extra early, a whole two hours before the evening service would begin” (193). –Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breakers
“By our second day at Camp Crescendo, the girls in my Brownie troop had decided to kick the asses of each and every girl in Brownie Troop 909” (1). –Z.Z. Packer, “Brownies”
“I was fourteen that summer. August brought heat I had never known, and during the dreamlike drought of those days I saw my father for the first time in my life” (1). –William Henry Lewis, “Shades”
“My desert-island, all-time, top five most memorable split-ups, in chronological order: 1. Alison Ashworth. 2. Penny Hardwick. 3. Jackie Allen. 4. Charlie Nicholson. 5. Sarah Kendrew.” (3). –Nick Hornsby, High Fidelity
“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petosky, Michigan, in August of 1974” (3). –Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
“I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm” (9). –Octavia Butler, Kindred