A Week of Writing Prompts (Parts of Speech Edition!)

It can sometimes be hard to feel inspired or motivated to write. At such times, nothing can put the pep in your step quite like a writing prompt, so here’s your monthly dose of prompts—enough for a whole week of daily new ideas!

And, for extra fun, these prompts are all inspired by the parts of speech.

Monday

The common definition of a noun is a word that refers to a person, place, or thing, but you can also define nouns by their morphology (words that vary in form based on gender, number, or case) or by their role in sentences (words that can be the head of a noun phrase). Some of my favorite nouns are the ones that take unusual plural forms: antennae, oxen, corpora, data, etc.

So, taking inspiration from unusual plurals, write a piece that focuses on group or crowd dynamics—how does more than one of something act differently from an individual? You might write a poem reflecting on a murmuration of birds, pondering the influence of the individual on the whole and vice versa. You could write a story about character struggling to shake themself free from a mob mentality. You could write an essay about a time when you went along with the crowd, for better or worse. Whatever you do, give your reader a taste of the strangeness of things in the plural.

Tuesday

Writing commentators love to say mean things about adverbs, those words that modify verbs and adjectives. Why run quickly when you could sprint? they ask. But, while it is true that a lot of writers may lean on clumsy modifiers to patch up their own underdeveloped vocabulary, sometimes it is important to be able to say how something was done rather than just asserting that it was.

Infuse your writing today with the energy of the adverb, writing a piece about someone changing the way they do something—whether it’s a poem about going grocery shopping after a breakup, an essay about birds weaving nests out of plastic and other bits of human waste, or story about a painter changing their art in an age of AI.