I was getting desparate when my 13 year old began to lose interest in writing. A gift she once enjoyed had become laborious and boring as she plodded through the typical textbook style of learning. I came across Joan D. Berbrich's student-friendly book "Writing About Amusing Things" and was instantly intrigued. As the title suggests, this workbook offers the student a wonderful outlet for expression, while at the same time teaching the student how to apply valuable writing skills and techniques to their own creativity. Included throughout the book are vocabulary words relating to the subjects being covered, brief writing exercises, proofreading excercises, sample paragraphs and suggestions for the students writing assignments. Exercises include writing paragraphs, essays, letters, short story, verse and more. While the student is learning good writing skills they are being reviewed in basic grammer skills as well, such as punctuation and sentence structure, nouns, verbs, adjectives prepositions and more.

I handed the book to my teenager, whose writing desire had been nearly completely stifiled, and watched as her love for writing has begun to blossom again. She now willingly writes a paper every day and enjoys being able to use her creativity and cleverness to write about things that are interesting and fun.

A few years ago (haha), I was privileged to study this book during my high school Creative Writing course. Now, I am the Creative Writing instructor and I cannot adequately praise Ms. Berbrich's work! The book guides students in turning their "snippets" of creative thought into works of quality prose and poetry. Thanks to the skills this book teaches, models and reinforces, students can use what they have learned from Writing Creatively in any piece for any forum.

Do not get this! I am a high school student, and our language teacher made us do weekly exercises for no apparent reason outa this book. As you be seeing, it never workd. It even had some errors in it. The jokes are not funny at all! Example: Silly Suzy said she selled sea shells by the seashore! HAHAHA, how funny! OVERALL: DO NOT GET THIS BOOK UNLESS YOU ARE A NERD!