Using Photography to Inspire Writing 8

By Hank Kellner

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Behold the Lowly Onion

Students who have handled most onions know that they have to be careful when doing so. If they’ve peeled or chopped onions, they might have cried. If they chewed on them, their mouths might have smarted. Worse yet, some students might have found that people turned away from them after they ate these members of the Allium plant family.

One or more of the responses described above could easily inspire any number of written compositions. Alternatively, you could present your students with several suggested writing assignments.

For example, you could ask them to describe an onion in terms of what it looks like, tastes like, feels like, and smells like. This approach will encourage them to describe an object in terms of sense impressions. On a more creative level, you could ask your students to personify an onion and reveal what it’s like to be peeled, chopped or sliced, added to a salad, and drenched with salad dressing.

Promote Narrative Writing…With Humor

In Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, adjunct Instructor of English Amber Luck promotes narrative writing by showing her students at Hennepin Technical College photographs depicting people in situations in which what is happening isn’t immediately clear. “The assignment,” she writes, “for each student to choose one person in one of the photos and write the story behind the picture from that person’s point of view.” The students then take turns reading their stories aloud to their classmates. “The results are often hilarious,” concludes Luck, “and the assignment works as a community-building exercise, as well as an introduction to narration.”

Create an Image File

At Kalamazoo Valley Community College in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Linda Dick uses many interesting, creative techniques to help her students create stories, poems, and expository pieces. In her creative writing classes, for example, she asks them to create an image file: a folder full of magazine images and/or Internet images of anything. “In the classroom,” she writes, “I ask the students to choose one of the images. Then I direct some of them to write a biography, others to create a scene, and still others to create a plot line.” Finally, the students put everything together spontaneously. “In that way,” she concludes, “they learn a great deal about the elements of fiction.”

There Is No Limit

As you can see, there is no limit to the ways in which you can use photographs to inspire writing. You can use them to help teach the different forms of rhetoric. You can use them to help your students write biographies or family histories. You can use them to help teach figures of speech, poems, or short stories. Or, if you wish, you can simply present photographs to your students without comment or discussion and allow them to create compositions based on whatever the photos suggest to them. •

Next: Using Photography to Inspire Writing 9

Copyright © Hank Kellner, 2009

About the Author | More by Hank Kellner
Write What You See: 99 Photos To Inspire Writing by Hank Kellner available from Amazon. Original Edition. Cottonwood Press. I-800-864-4297. Cottonwood Press is distributed by Independent Publishers Group. Includes supplementary CD with photos. 8 ½ x11, 120 pages, perfect binding, ISBN 978-1-877-673-83-2, LCCN 2008938630. Visit the author’s blog at hank-englisheducation.blogspot.com. The author will contribute a portion of the royalties earned from the sale of this book to The Wounded Warriors Project.

03/23/09