Hand out excerpts from Poe ("The Fall of the House of Usher"), Woolf (To the Lighthouse), and Hemingway (A Moveable Feast). Ask students to read the pieces to themselves and identify the mood of each piece. Discuss and list the moods students identify. Have students read excerpts aloud, one at a time for the entire class. Instruct them to try to reflect the mood of the description in each author's voice, the manner, to read each piece "expressively." Next, point out that each piece describes a place, including weather as a part of each scene. Ask students to write two of their own descriptions, copying the style of two of the authors above.
Now have the students read their own pieces aloud without announcing the style they are imitating and have the class guess which writer the piece was modeled on. Lead the class in a discussion of the stylistic elements that characterize each of the writers the students imitated.
