Contributors


Writing Program
English Dept

A Whole New Look:

1. Sketch/Draw a possible audience .

2. Draft a new opening for the text, one that's suitable to the audience you have drawn.

3. Share your new opening in a small group. Ask the group to guess the audience

A Whole New Look 2:

1. Write a Letter to the Editor of a local newspaper dealing with an issue you addressed in a previous writing assignment.

2. Your letter must meet the restrictions of the newspaper-the Pantagraph will not accept Letters to the Editor that are more than 300 words.

Example:

Here's a journal entry by a student:

The other day I read an article about a girl who drank herself to death. Reading that article really made me think. The article was about a 16 year old girl who was bet to drink a whole bottle of schnapps. Of course she won the bet, but her prize was death. Her friends that were at the party took her to someone's house and put her in a room to go to sleep. In the morning the father of the girl who lived in the house found her not breathing. The girl had died in her sleep. If the teenagers would have took her to the hospital that night then she probably would have lived. The proof of the alcohol was 107. When they found her in the morning, 12 hours after she had drank the alcohol; her blood level was .4. Which means that her blood alcohol level was probably .7 that night.

When I read this story it really scared me. Just to think that something could happen like this to anyone really freaked me out. It made me worry about my friends and my own safety at parties. I think that the way the girls friends handled the situation was really immature. First of all they shouldn't have bet her to drink that alcohol and secondly they should have known better than to leave her unsupervised knowing how much alcohol she had just drank. I'm not really sure what I would do if I was in that situation, I would hope that I would know the right thing to do and take them to a hospital. If I was stupid enough to drink that much alcohol I would also hope my friends would be smart enough to take me to the hospital.

I think people need to be smarter when they go to parties. This girl and her friends weren't smart which resulted in a death. They should have known that its not smart to make bets about drinking. They should have known its not smart to take bets about drinking. They should have known its not smart to leave a drunk person alone. They should have known that drinking and driving isn't the only way alcohol can kill. I hope my friends and I remember this article and make better choices than these kids did. I would hate to see that happen to someone I love.

Start drafting a Letter to the Editor by underlining the most important points in this entry. Then, draw a line through each piece of information that the audience won't need. Finally, start writing your Letter to the Editor on a separate sheet of paper. The letter can not be more than 300 words long.

Audience Index \ Home