aclJohn's Creative Writing Finds

The Wasteline Test assesses whether a person's writing is 'flabby' or 'fit'.

The test works by counting percentages of words in five categories commonly associated with stodgy sentences...

• weak verbs;
• abstract nouns;
• prepositions;
• adjectives/adverbs; and
• 'waste words' (it, this, that, there).
  

For every writing sample users submit, they will receive an overall fitness rating ranging from lean to heart attack territory.

Visit http://www.writersdiet.com/wasteline.html to find...

Are there similarities in your written works and the works of a famous author? To find which author’s works your writings resemble, head on over to “I Write Like.”

I Write Like is a free and simple to use web service that claims that it can tell you which author you write like.

Users paste in a piece of their work and after quick analysis "I write Like" displays a famous author’s name whose work their writing resembles. They can paste in any text they have recently worked on:

The Scholastic website has an area called "Writing with Writers" that might be of interest to practitioners and learners because it pulls back the veil on the writing process.

The progression of activities and sequencing of tasks (along with insights by known authors)

• Jane Yolen,
  
• Virginia Hamilton, and
  
• Jack Prelutsky,
  

...makes Writing with Writers a valuable tool for most learners. A bonus is that learners can get stories published here, too, so the writing is an authentic exper...

Wacky Web Tales is a collection of "Auto-Creative Writing" activities from Houghton Mifflin.

Wacky Web Tales...

• is designed for younger learners but has the potential to be used with all age groups.
• asks learners to fill-in a blank form using words to make parts of speech prompts.

The words the learners write into the blank form are the used in an automatically generated short story. This online resource could be...

• used by learners to practice identifying the parts of speech;
• used by...

StoryJumper is a site that gives parents, guardians, children, and authors a set of intuitive tools for writing and illustrating childrens stories.

The goal of StoryJumper is to inspire anyone that's ever wanted to write a story for children to get started.

Visit http://www.storyjumper.com/ to find out more and/or http://www.storyjumper.com/main/starter for online CPD/tutorials.

Have you and/or your learners got a story to tell or a poem to write? You can now both do so with pictures from Flickr using FlickrPoet.

Simply go to FlickrPoet and type a sentence. When you click on the ‘Show Story‘ button, FlickrPoet will browse the Flickr database and pull an image for each word/phrase used in your sentence. These images will be organized to provide you with a picture story.

Go on try it out at http://www.storiesinflight.com/flickrpoet/index.php.

Five Card Stories is an experimental web site designed to foster visual thinking.

How does it work? Users...

• are dealt five random photographs for each of five draws,
  
• select one each time to add to their selection of images; they will probably find it easier if the first image they select is of a person or animal, which can then be the main character in their story.
  
• take the 5 images to tell a story; illustrated by them...
  • give it a title,
    
  • add a name (it doesn't have to be your rea...