I think this is the right sub-forum for this. I'm an English teacher in a secondary school in the UK. I use this activity for students aged 11 - 16, adapting it for different ages through the extract choice. I've found this a really great way of helping them to develop their descriptive writing. It offers a number of benefits that I think could be useful to a lot of writers and I think it could be fun to see what people come up with here. Benefits include: getting you to really look at how a description is constructed; forcing you to use sentence structures that you might not otherwise use because they are not part of your 'go-to' repertoire; thinking very carefully about vocab choice; exposure to some truly wonderful examples of writing. The rules: Rewrite the extract. Use exactly the same number of words per sentence. Use exactly the same punctuation in exactly the same places. Use exactly the same word classes (replace nouns with nouns, verbs with verbs, etc). Change the setting / tone / atmosphere / etc. as much as possible. I'd usually give a specific scenario (or selection of them) to my students. If you just want to experiment with this and need a brief, you are tasked with changing the following to a description of an urban war zone. However, feel free to make it specific to something you are working on - just tell us what you are describing and how it relates to your own work. Additional rules that may make this more interesting for this forum: Post a new extract whenever you want. This will become the new extract that people must rewrite (doesn't have to be description of a setting - it could be non-fiction, a dialogue scene... hell, even a stanza from a poem...) You may break any of the main rules only after you have completed a rewrite that adheres to them (my students sometimes get this option - they get all the benefits of the main activity and then get to perfect what they have written by reflecting and chopping or adding stuff as necessary). Your first extract is the first three sentences of Jack London's 'White Fang'. I just posted them in a thread about great descriptive writing and doing so reminded me of this activity, so it's only fitting that we should start with it: Dark spruce forest frowned on either side of the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean toward each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land.
