The Rudy Giuliani Game

Vice President Joe Biden, in his run for presidency, once quipped during a Democratic debate that former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani made his own presidential candidacy out of saying three words: a noun, a verb, and 9/11.

Putting politics aside, Biden's critique does imply the power of two things: 1. A historic event and it's connotations, and 2. the simple sentence!

How can this help our writing? Quite simply, we are going to use he Rudy Giuliani method to brainstorm a handful of possible "non-traditional patriotic images"for Essay 1.

Here are the simple steps of the The Rudy Giuliani Game:

1. Draft a simple sentence using:  a noun, a verb, a preposition (on, during, after, ...) and 9/11.

2. Repeat this formula five to ten times, so that you will have a list for the class to discuss which images both surprise and engage us as an audience.

Here are a few examples of how students have responded to the game in the past. For one, we can see powerful, serious, and evocative images created out of such a simple exercise:

• Flags fly on 9/11.
• Shadows died after 9/11.
• Firefighters fought on 9/11.
• Dust settled after 9/11.
• Strangers cried on 9/11.
• Doors opened on 9/11
• Pens wrote because 9/11.