9 Ideas for Quick but Meaningful Writing Activities for Students

The structured 5C analytical paragraph is our go-to assignment for writing. We like it because it works for everything: short-answer questions on reading assignments, paragraph-length writing assignments, and body paragraphs for full essays.

To be proficient writers, our students must master the claim-evidence-commentary trio. It’s the base of every paragraph format you’ll find and the core of most writing rubrics. Students need repeated practice with this trio, and the 5C paragraph makes it easy to provide opportunities while also giving students a go-to structure they can rely on for multiple writing occasions.

Each paragraph includes a Claim, Concrete Evidence sentence (where their evidence must show rather than tell), Context sentence (where they place the evidence in the larger context of the story or argument), Commentary sentence (where they explicitly connect the evidence to the claim), and Connection sentence (where they bridge to the next paragraph or connect a single paragraph to the larger text or larger world).

It doesn’t take a full class period to write one 5C paragraph (even if you require multiple sets of concrete evidence-context-commentary, making it more like an 8 or 9C paragraph), and you can easily adapt the prompt to address the reading standards you’re focusing on in a particular lesson.

If you’re interested in introducing this format to your students, our Paragraph Writing Strategy lesson includes everything you need to help your students craft a solid analytical paragraph analyzing a character in whatever text you’ve been reading (including a visually appealing bookmark to help students remember the 5Cs throughout the year).

We might not have incorporated business letters into our curriculum if it weren’t for the California High School Exit Exam, first administered in 2001 and suspended in 2015. Since a business letter was a possible choice for the essay section, we reviewed business letter format as part of our test preparation.

Once the exam was suspended, we realized that introducing students to formal business letter format was still useful. Even if they didn’t have to write business letters at work, they would need to include a cover letter when applying for jobs, and at minimum, they needed a letter of introduction for their Senior Project.

Another reason we kept teaching business letter format is that the written content is pretty straightforward; it’s the formatting that is unique. This means students generally don’t struggle with the writing task and earn many of their points for simply following directions. For students willing to pay attention, the business letter is typically an easy A in their writing category grade.

For a topic, we assigned students to write a letter of complaint, thinking this was, at least, a plausible reason someone might still write a formal letter, and if nothing else, teenagers certainly love to complain. Students can complete the assignment in only one or two class periods, making it a relatively easy lesson to slip in.

If you’re looking for a quick and easy but still useful activity, consider assigning a Letter of Complaint to your students. We’ve got everything you need, including a prompt, sample, and rubric. We’ve even included both a detailed and a holistic rubric so you can decide how particular you want to be about formatting.

Email etiquette has become an increasingly common topic for teachers to cover (motivated in large part by ridiculous emails from students cramming an all-lowercase demand into the subject line).

Consider turning the business letter activity mentioned above into an email lesson. We were listening to a presentation the other day that claimed cover letters have largely been replaced by email, so students benefit from learning that email can have a formal, professional use.

Because of the importance of a thesis statement and a logical line of reasoning to an essay, it’s essential that our students be able to craft a solid thesis statement and outline an argument that logically supports it. This is a small thing you can focus on that will yield significant results, and students will benefit from practice writing thesis statements and outlines, even if they don’t actually craft the essay.

Practicing this skill can take place in a single class period, and it’s relatively easy to provide feedback as you walk around and engage with students. If students are expected to write timed essays, this gives them practice brainstorming and organizing their arguments in a shortened time period, and even when students write longer process essays, familiarity with this thought process will strengthen the quality of their arguments.

Every teacher has that possibly irrational hill they are willing to die on. Correctly integrating and punctuating quotations was ours. We developed an obsession with getting our students to punctuate, integrate, and cite quotations correctly.

Some might say this obsession was an unhealthy one (our students certainly thought so), but it involved tangible skills that could be taught in a class period and easily integrated into any activity throughout the year, and it yielded huge results in terms of our students’ overall writing quality.

Taking a class period here and there to really focus on handling quotations correctly is worth your while, and it’s something that can be done in isolation or as part of a longer writing unit.

You can integrate this into your instruction starting tomorrow with our unit focused on integrating and embedding quotations using MLA format. It includes our seven rules for punctuating quotations (which you can also download for free), four methods for integrating quotations, multiple practice activities, and a multiple-choice quiz. Package them together as a unit or roll them out as mini-lessons when you have time, but we think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the results!

Related to correctly punctuating quotations is correctly punctuating dialogue, another skill that’s easy to teach and can really improve the quality of students’ writing, especially narratives.

Once you review the rules of dialogue, there are many ways to have your students practice (including telling them to just . . . write a dialogue). But we’ve found it’s helpful to give them a prompt. We’ve used images and short films as inspiration, but a coworker suggested one of our favorites: using comic strips.

She found dozens of Calvin & Hobbes comic strips, and we distributed them to students, tasking them with converting the comic strip into a dialogue. What we really liked about using the comic strips is that the illustrations gave students something to work with in crafting interesting dialogue tags.

The activity was quick, fun, and productive, and works equally well with Pixar short films (students love them, and there’s no existing dialogue). We used the Pixar short approach as part of a larger narrative writing unit, but you could easily make it a one day activity.

While most of our students know they need to include a counterargument in their argumentative essays, our students really struggle to present and then rebut the opposing point of view without completely undermining their own arguments.

Giving our students opportunities to write paragraphs that rebut opposing claims is a quick way to strengthen their writing skills for longer arguments, and the topic can be as simple as a “This or That” question.

Steph found a blog post (which, despite her best efforts, she cannot find again) that proposed a “One might argue . . . because . . . However . . . because . . . Therefore” structure that would have been useful with her struggling sophomores when we did persuasive writing units. There are many lesson plans with similar frames that can help our students understand how this kind of writing works, and they don’t need to complete an entire persuasive writing unit in order to do it.

If you have not yet discovered Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s book They Say / I Say (a staple in AP Capstone courses and many college writing classes), you need a copy. The premise is that students need instruction in how to add their own voice to what others have already said, and templates are a fantastic way to help them learn how to do it. 

Graff and Birkenstein provide pages of templates that help students to summarize what others have said and then respond with their own ideas and opinions. Each chapter includes short practice activities that require students to use the templates to respond to excerpted arguments. These short activities wouldn’t take much class time and could be taught as standalone lessons, but they will go a long way toward improving your students’ academic writing.

Donald and Jenny Killgallon’s sentence-composing series, particularly Paragraphs for Middle School and Paragraphs for High School, teaches grammar through sentence-combining, particularly building more interesting sentences by adding words, phrases, and clauses to the beginning, middle, and end of their own sentences. Each lesson includes practice activities, which can be completed in 5–10 minutes, where students use familiar mentor texts to construct their own sentences imitating professional writers’ style.

This is probably not something we would have had success with in our standard-level courses (though Quill uses a sentence-combining approach to reinforce basic grammar skills that worked great for these students), but if you have higher-level students (especially students with a solid grammar foundation), the Killgallons’ series is a great way to help them level up their writing style, aiming for the sophisticated writing that characterizes the highest scores on most writing rubrics.