Writing for the American Cancer Society: Middle school language arts students in Dallas worked throughout the entire school year with their teacher Marjorie Kleinneiur on a project for the local chapter of the American Cancer Society. Students were aware of the rising incidence of teenage smoking and selected that as their Writing for a Healthy Community topic. They contacted the American Cancer Society and met with members of the staff, who worked closely with them throughout the year and who provided them with documents and other sources of information. Students wrote, designed, field-tested, and published six brochures advocating against smoking and providing information for young smokers who want to break the habit. Through the American Cancer Society, these brochures were distributed throughout the community.

Teens Need Teens: Twenty 7th and 8th graders from Lawrence, Massachusetts, attended the Andover/Lawrence Summer Writing Workshop directed by Lou Bernieri. They formed seven groups, with a high school and college student in each group as leader/mentor. Each group chose one health issue in the community to research and discuss among themselves and with their friends, family, and outside specialists. After gathering information from their homes and on the streets, from the library, and from interviewing experts, they followed the steps for creating a public document outlined in the Guide to Writing for the Community. They published a packet of seven fact sheets on AIDS, smoking, rape, teen pregnancy, street drugs, depression, and domestic violence. The packet, distributed widely in the Lawrence schools and elsewhere, is entitled TNT (Teens Need Teens). The students involved agreed that the most important part of the project was what they learned about these health issues and about publishing documents that other young people could actually use.

Another group of Lawrence middle school students working on a Writing for a Healthy Community project decided that teenagers would be more likely to read and respond to comic strips than to flyers and brochures. Working in groups, they researched the issues that were important to them and their families, and invited a professional comic strip artist/cartoonist to work with them. They studied design, scripting, graphics--even comic strip history--before they produced comic strips on their topics. These comic strips, judged by outsiders to be extremely effective, were enlarged to poster size and placed on public transportation vehicles in the Lawrence area. In addition to the public service that is at the center of their work, these students learned a broad range of communication and workplace skills in the process.

Learning for Life: A senior English class at C. A. Johnson High School in Columbia, South Carolina, researched and wrote about health issues important to South Carolina teenagers, especially related to teenage pregnancy. They visited a rural community health center, one of thirteen centers which are providers of quality primary health services, especially to medically underserved families in the state. Students from this rural community met with the urban students of Johnson High School. Together they developed a set of compelling questions for research, most of which were generated by their inquiry into the use of Norplant contraceptives by adolescent females, addressing legal, governmental, ethical, and medical practices. The center's nurse-practitioner, who met with the group, pointed out that this kind of in-depth study of a particular health issue (self-education) by teens is likely to lead to the kind of positive, personal health practices that can follow the individual throughout life.

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