Colorful Emotions

Worksheet Description

The “Show Don’t Tell” worksheet is a writing exercise designed to help students improve their ability to convey emotions through descriptive writing. The worksheet presents eight boxes, each containing an emotion such as “paranoid,” “infatuated,” and “vengeful.” Students are instructed to write a sentence in each box that illustrates the given emotion through actions, reactions, or internal thoughts of a character, rather than simply stating the emotion. This method of writing helps readers to infer the feelings being portrayed through context clues in the narrative.

The worksheet aims to teach students how to effectively ‘show’ emotions in their writing instead of directly ‘telling’ the reader what a character is feeling. By focusing on descriptive details and the characters’ interactions with their environment or other characters, students learn to convey deeper layers of emotion. This skill enhances storytelling by allowing the reader to experience the character’s emotions organically. Additionally, the exercise encourages students to delve into a richer vocabulary and to consider the subtleties of human emotional expression in their writing.