Vocabulary Soap

I had a wonderful creative writing teacher in high school: Mrs. Hoeft. The English Department required that we learn 10 new vocabulary words a week (all SAT list words). To make it fun and indeed creative writing, Mrs. Hoeft had us write stories that used all 10 words in any order that we liked. We could use several in one sentence, and we could use as many vocabulary-word-less sentences in-between as we needed to drive the plot. It was a lot more fun than writing unconnected sentences that demonstrated our ability to memorize definitions.

I took it one step further. My story was ongoing, and it developed based on each week's vocabulary list. Since my story was unpredictable, I made it a soap opera As the Vocabulary Turns. At the end of each "chapter," I would ask questions in the style of the tv comedy Soap, such as "Will Blake continue to act sophomorically? Is Taylor's speech really soporific--or have the guests been drugged? Does Stryker have a salubrious solution to the situation? Find out this and the answers to other questions next week on As the Vocabulary Turns."