It's all about the pictures. When student writers rely primarily on vague statements, adjectives, and adverbs, their writing doesn't score well on tests, and worse, sounds generic, voiceless, and dull. Creating vivid pictures is the key to good writing. In this book, a teacher/writer/cartoonist provides tools for helping students write about people, places, events, and even abstractions so that their readers can see, hear, smell, touch, and taste their topics. The author demonstrates ways to use figurative language, movie techniques, moment-by-moment narration, hypothetical scenarios, and dialogue to make any kind of writing come alive on the page.- Author's lively, original, reproducible middle-school-based comic strips make key points about writing through humor.- Classroom-tested ideas produce powerful, engaging writing and raise test scores.- Writing exercises included here inspire even reluctant writers.