You can get your reluctant writer to take a greater interest in writing by using the analogy of photo journalism. Try these steps for your next writing assignment and see how it works.

1. Take pictures of your trip or activity with a digital camera.

2. Download the images from your camera to your computer. Use iPhoto with the Macintosh or My Pictures with the PC.

3. Select and sequence the pictures you want to use for your writing activity.

4. Open a new word processor document, e.g., Word or AppleWorks.

5. Drag the individual photos in to the word processor document. Put a couple of lines (returns) between each photo.

6. Go to the top of the document and mark your insertion point. Enter a title for your article and your byline (author or authors).

7. Discuss what you want to write before the first picture. Say it out loud. When the content is agreed upon, have one person go to the computer and enter the agreed upon text.

8. Move the insertion point to a point just after the picture and repeat steps 7 and 8 until you have entered all the raw text for the article.

9. Go back and read your article out loud stopping to make any corrections necessary or to add additional text.

10. Read the article once more, sentence by sentence and make any grammatical changes necessary, Ask yourself "Is this a complete sentence?" and "Does this sentence sound right?"

11. Run the spell checker on the computer.

12. With the word processor go back and center the title, the byline, and each photo.

13. Print your document out on a printer and do a final read through of the printed document.

14. An optional additional step would be to convert the photo journalism article to a written report with no pictures.