If you are looking for soemthign to do with your class on Monday or Tuesday of next week, this article from Slate provides an interesting template for deconstructing style or structure in a text. The article’s example is the writing of Lewis Lapham, longtime editor of Harper’s.

“The swarm of cameras following Monica Lewinsky on her progress through a Washington airport or a New York restaurant wouldn't have surprised the Roman mob familiar with the expensive claques traipsing after the magnificence of the Emperor Nero, their eager and well-fed sycophancy presumably equivalent to the breathless enthusiasms of Barbara Walters.”

In essence, Lapham was rephrasing Ecclesiastes: All is vanity. There is nothing new under the sun.

The author, Timothy Noah, argues that Lapham writes this essential sentence over and over, and he (Noah) provides a Lapham MadLib:

The Bush administration's forbearance as Gen. Pervez Musharraf proclaims, like [vainglorious monarch], that [famous megalomaniacal statement] recasts [open Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to any random page, close eyes, plunge finger into text, and insert here a précis of incident described therein] as opera bouffe. The sham outrage teases forth memories of the contortions displayed by [famous Ottoman acrobat of the 15^th century] or the prevarications of [obscure three-fingered gangster of the 1930s] as the Katie Courics and Wolf Blitzers of their day distracted the starving masses with [celebratory ritual performed by an island-based indigenous people] and competitions to mimic the cry of the mighty [extinct animal from the Cretaceous period].

I don’t think it would be difficult to pull a passage out of a text you are teaching or something on the news- or blog-osphere and have your students do a similar exercise during the throw-away days before Thanksgiving.