Passion Prompts: Sentence Starters for Writing About Relationships

By ANNISSA HAMBOUZ and KATHERINE SCHULTEN

Tina Fineberg for The New York TimesLia Batkin, the bride, descends an illuminated staircase as she makes an entrance at the start of her wedding ceremony to Seth Kaplan at Tribeca Rooftop. Go to related Vows column »

Love may be a many splendored thing, but it’s not always easy to write about. In honor of Valentine’s Day, we thought we’d offer some sentence starters to help.

Though most of the sentences we’ve chosen are opening lines from New York Times essays or articles about romantic love, you can use them as jumping-off points to write about any kind of relationship. So whether you’re describing fondness for a friend, sentiment for a sweetheart, bereavement for a breakup, partiality for a pet, or even a soft spot for your skateboard, choose from among the 21 lines below to get started.

At the end of the post we offer additional ideas for using these sentence starters in the classroom, as well as links to more Valentine’s resources, including our Valentine’s Day Across the Curriculum collection.

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Huge bank of image prompts for your next writing session

What is it? Pic-Lits is a very simple site that has a bank of images for teachers to use to stimulate different styles of writing as well as a drag and drop bank of words you can select with with your students to describe what is happening in the picture or just associate basic text related to the image.

How can I use this in the Classroom? Pic-Lits would be great for snapshot writing sessions when you want your students to extend their vocabulary by using nuns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives. Simply show them a picture then as a group select words you would like to see included with a related writing task and let them go to it.  Students could work through this process about 4 times in an hour depending upon their enthusiasm and ability.  Access it here.