Select one passage of about 250 words from the readings for this class or from another piece of nature writing--either poetry or prose--that you find particularly effective or informative. Look up any unfamiliar words or words that seem to have different meanings from their present ones in the OED [Oxford English Dictionary]. Read each sentence aloud and copy it out in longhand in your journal. Write an imitation of the passage in your own words. Make each of your sentences correspond to a sentence in the passage you copied. Feel free to update the subject matter and references and dialect.

Attach to your exercise a list of the words you looked up in the OED and the definitions that apply to them in the passage you select.

Samples: