Here is a strategy that dates back to the fifteenth-century scholar Erasmus. Erasmus would give his students this sentence: "Your letter delighted me very much." Then he would ask each member of the class to play with the arrangement and the selection of words to create five new sentences that communicated a similar meaning in different ways. Corbett states that Eramus' students created a total 150 variations of the sentence and gives these as a few examples:

Your epistle has cheered me greatly.
Your note has been the occasion of unusual pleasure for me.
When your letter came, I was seized with an extraordinary pleasure.
What you wrote me was most delightful.
On reading your letter, I was filled with joy.
Your letter provided me with no little pleasure.

          Try a similar experiment. Divide the class into five teams. Give each team one of the sentences below and ask them to create five variations that communicate the same, or nearly the same, idea. The sentences below are taken from Ashleigh Brilliant's book Appreciate Me Now and Avoid the Rush:

Nothing is as good as it used to be---especially my memory.

Slavery and torture were outlawed long ago, but for some reason, marriage is still legal.

Tomorrow is another day, but I hope it's not another day like this one.

The best thing about my lack of progress is that I can't fall back very far.

Communication with the dead is only a little more difficult that communication with something living.