I use this creative writing assignment to teach students about the formal qualities of the Spenserian stanza. I give this assignment as an extra-credit option for students who are not doing well on their homework quizzes (especially when we are reading Spenser's Faerie Queene).  It is a low-risk, high-gain assignment that gives them a deeper appreciation for Spenser’s mastery of a highly restrictive poetic form.

Here is my handout:

Write a Spenserian stanza on a topic of your choosing.  In order to write an effective stanza you will have to take the following into consideration:

1. You will write nine lines of poetry with the rhyme scheme ABABBCBCC.
2. The first eight lines will have 10 syllables (i.e., pentameter) and the last line will have 12 syllables (i.e., hexameter).
3. The lines will be in iambic meter (an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, repeated).  You can play with the meter somewhat, but you can’t disregard it.
4. The grammar will make sense and you will communicate an idea to the reader.
5. The stanza will demonstrate creativity and thoughtfulness.

Here is sample stanza that a past student wrote; note that the writer includes allusions to other poems.  You can allude to other material in our syllabus too, since that was in fact a tactic that Spenser used in The Faerie Queene!

I use the following rubric to justify my grade to the students:

It's been my experience that students have a lot of fun with the assignment.  Even if they are not very good at writing Spenserian stanzas, they develop an appreciation for Spenser as a poet and  become much better readers of Spenser's poem!

In this post, I am going to share a strategy of writing instruction that I have been using for several years now, which is adapted from the "Power Writing" technique. I learned this system from Ali Mayo, one of the founders and a lead instructor at SacramEducate tutoring center in Sacramento. I have also presented this method at UC Davis and at the OHS.

What is “Power Writing” and how can it help my students?

“Power Writing” is a pedagogical method that elementary school teachers developed for teaching a fairly complicated idea—the paragraph—to very young kids.  It uses graphic organizers to break the paragraph up into parts.  I have tweaked the basic concept of power writing to use in my own high school and college-level classrooms, and it has worked wonders for my students, especially science students (because it helps them to understanding that writing is a logical activity and not about feelings).

I like to teach this writing activity in conjunction with a lesson on sonnets, because sonnets work a bit like essays. There is a desired form in both: the creative component comes in how the author plays within the set of rules that the form requires as opposed to breaking the rules of the form. Also, sonnets make arguments and then they nuance, complicate, or push those arguments to their logical conclusions.

My favorite sonnet to use for this activity is John Donne's Holy Sonnet 14 (Batter my heart, three-person'd God). Here is the poem in its entirety:

The basic idea of “power writing” is to ask students to consider what each sentence of their paragraph is doing.  There are three basic kinds of sentences in the paragraph, which I ask students to identify with a color:

Sentences that make arguments (we color-code these as red sentences).  There are two types of red sentences:

• Topic sentences, which state the main argument of the paragraph, go at the beginning of the paragraph.
• Concluding sentences, which state the paragraph’s relevance to the essay’s thesis, go at the end of the paragraph

Sentences that provide evidence (we color code these as blue sentences).  Objectively true observations from the text, like quotes. There must be at least one “blue” sentence in each body paragraph of an essay.  If there is no evidence, then the paragraph has turned into plot summary or personal narrative, and needs to get back on track.  A writer cannot analyze a text without talking about the text. The evidence sentences comes after the topic sentence but before your explanation sentences (below). The analysis flows from the evidence instead of evidence being tacked on to support a reading.

Sentences that explain how the evidence supports the argument (we color code these as green sentences).  Students should know that while it might be clear to them how the evidence supports the topic sentence of the paragraph, it will not be clear to everyone.  This is the space where they should explain or analyze the evidence to show how it supports the argument.  After each “blue” sentence, there should be one or two “green” sentences explaining the evidence and how it proves the red argument of the paragraph.  These are the kinds of sentences that fill out a paper and help a writer to develop her ideas. If a paper is short, a writer can fill it out by developing his green sentences, not by adding more quotes.

The next step in the classroom is to use this writing instruction to segue into an analysis of Donne's poem and then to model how a paragraph might be constructed using the power writing technique. It is time consuming--count on a full hour devoted to this activity--but it helps to explain to students who don't understand the genre of expository writing what you expect them to do.

The reason the activity takes so long in class is because you have to wait for students to think about things and to craft their sentences.  I have included a video below that models what this activity might look like. Since I am not asking for feedback from students, the video is relatively quick (about 20 minutes).