WRITING/ASSESSMENT
Practice Writing Dialogue

Submitted by: I Love That Teaching Idea! Staff
From: SLC, Utah
Date Submitted: July 28, 2001

When I want to give my students a quick practice in writing dialogue (and a great assessment tool for myself!) I pass out cartoon strips I clipped from the local newspaper. I then instruct them to write the same dialogue found in the "bubbles" between the characters exactly as it is written in the cartoon strip. Because quotation marks are usually not written in the cartoons, this makes it very easy for me to assess my students on the punctuation and quotation marks rather than having them try to be creative in writing two speakers' thoughts to one another. In this activity I'm looking to see if my students know the mechanics of writing dialogue, rather than the conversation itself.