101 Activities For Teaching Creativity And Problem Solving

Ticklers: Related and Unrelated Stimuli 79

101 Activities for Teaching Creativity and Problem Solving.Copyright © 2005 by John Wiley &

Sons, Inc. Reproduced by permission of Pfeiffer, an Imprint of Wiley. http://www.pfeiffer.com

13. Excerpt Excitation

Background

I quote others only the better to express myself.

—Montaigne

Writers frequently use quotations to emphasize important points or to provide different

perspectives on a topic. This ability to provoke new perspectives gives quotations the

potential to tickle your brain and generate new ideas. As William Thackeray once said,

“The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar

things new.”

Excerpt Excitation uses quotations to help think of ways to make familiar things new.

That’s an essential ingredient of creative thinking—taking what appears to be known and

applying some unique twist to it. Quotations do this by forcing us to consider angles we

might otherwise have overlooked.

Objectives

• To help participants generate as many creative ideas as possible


• To help participants learn how to use the activities to generate ideas

Participants

Small groups of four to seven people each

Materials, Supplies, and Equipment

• For each group: markers, two flip charts, and masking tape for posting flip-chart
  sheets


• For each participant: one sheet each of three different colors of sticking dots
  (^1 ⁄ 2 ” diameter) and one pad of 4 x 6 Post-it®Notes


• One or more book of quotations or Internet quote websites, such as http://www.quotation-
  spage.com or http://www.quoteland.com

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