I use this Four Visitors assignment at the beginning of the semester to help my students learn narrative structure and to allow them to have some fun with writing. As we lead up to the writing of the story, we talk about narrative structure and pacing, descriptive writing, and punctuation of dialogue (in preparation for punctuating research quotes). Since the story isn’t about the students’ own lives, I find that sometimes the peer review is a little less threatening. Each of the students in a peer review group can help envision ideas to make the characters of the story even more zany when they appear in the final draft.