Emotion in Shadows

This worksheet requires students to choose from several prompts and craft a short scene that reveals a character’s emotional state without ever naming the emotion directly. Students must rely on sensory descriptions, body language, setting cues, and carefully chosen actions-techniques that push them toward more mature, intentional narrative writing. Because each prompt includes a clear scenario, teachers can easily model how emotional clues are embedded in dialogue fragments, pacing shifts, environmental details, and character reactions. The activity is excellent for teaching inference, helping students understand how readers interpret subtle signals rather than explicit statements. It also provides teachers with a strong tool for assessing how well students apply show-don’t-tell strategies across full scenes, not just single sentences.

Curriculum Skills

Crafting full narrative scenes using showing techniques

Revealing emotion implicitly through behavior, setting, and sensory clues

Applying sensory detail for stronger descriptive writing

Deepening characterization with subtle, indirect emotional development

This worksheet is part of our Show, Don’t Tell Techniques Worksheets collection.