In my playwriting career, good dialogue had a very slippery definition that was only really communicated through the canonized texts we read. These texts were almost always by white men. Most of the time, students learn how to write dialogue by ‘imitation of the greats’, which can lead students away from their authentic writing voice. By bringing our understanding off of the page and into our bodies, the students’ experience of composing their own dialogue will be firmly grounded in their own self expression. In this workshop we’ll read a 3-4 sentence long speech aloud from a fiction book students are currently reading, and then I’ll tell them we’ll be re-writing the speech in a totally different style by the end of class.