Synonyms for "Said"

Today's creative writing mini-lesson was focused on setting a tone in dialogue by using more accurate words than "said". If you really want to convey a message to your reader, you need to do this with precise language.

To start today's lesson, you were divided into three groups: sad, mad, and glad. (I realize that these are all puke words, but it's so handy that they rhyme. I couldn't resist!) In your groups, you needed to brainstorm as many descriptive words as your could for your emotion. The words you chose needed to be as expressive as possible. We're going to refer back to these lists in future dialogue-writing lessons. Here's what you all came up with:


We used this list of emotion-specific words to bridge to our Poetry Friday lesson. For Poetry Friday, we read a poem by William Carlos Williams. It's called "This is Just to Say" and it's a pretty famous poem. In it, the speaker kinda-sorta-but-not-really apologizes for eating the plums that his spouse was saving for breakfast. For your poem, you needed to choose one of the words from the above list and write a "This is Just to ________" poem. (You fill in the blank.)

Here are two student sample poems from today's lesson. These and others were shared aloud.