The Giver ends without resolving exactly what Jonas finds once he leaves the community, which gives students a genuinely open creative writing opportunity: imagine and narrate what happens next. This kind of narrative extension assignment tests different skills than an analytical essay, and it needs a different grading approach entirely.

A strong narrative extension stays consistent with the established world and characters of the novel rather than inventing a resolution that contradicts what students already know about Jonas, the community, or the physical circumstances of his escape. Grading should reward this kind of internal consistency explicitly.

This assignment also offers a chance to assess voice and characterization directly, since a strong continuation captures Jonas's specific way of perceiving the world, newly awakened to color and sensation, rather than reading like generic adventure writing disconnected from his particular journey.

Grading criteria for this creative assignment should include a clear category for consistency with the source material alongside the more typical narrative writing criteria like voice, pacing, and descriptive detail.

Balancing Creative Freedom With Textual Fidelity

The central tension in grading this assignment is allowing genuine creative freedom while still holding students accountable to the world Lowry established. A rubric that is too restrictive stifles the creativity the assignment is meant to encourage; one that is too loose loses the connection to careful reading of the source text.

• Require consistency with established character traits and world details
• Reward writing that captures Jonas's specific sensory awakening, not generic description
• Check for narrative pacing appropriate to the assignment's length
• Look for evidence that the student engaged closely with the novel's actual ending
• Allow genuine ambiguity in outcome, since the novel itself never fully resolves

Grading Voice and Characterization

Capturing Jonas's voice well requires attention to how Lowry's own prose style shifts once Jonas begins receiving memories, becoming more sensory and emotionally vivid than the flat, controlled language used to describe life within the community. Strong student continuations often mirror this shift naturally.

Grading criteria should specifically look for this kind of stylistic awareness, since a student who writes a vivid, sensory continuation is demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of how Lowry uses prose style to reflect Jonas's changing perception, beyond just plot invention.

Handling the Wide Range of Creative Outcomes

This assignment inevitably produces a huge range of different endings, from students who imagine Jonas finding a warm, welcoming Elsewhere to students who imagine a much darker fate. Grading should remain neutral about which emotional tone the student chooses, focusing instead on craft and consistency regardless of the ending's mood.

A shared rubric emphasizing craft over outcome helps ensure that a student who writes a bittersweet or ambiguous ending is not penalized relative to a classmate who chooses a more straightforwardly happy resolution, since both are valid creative choices given the novel's genuinely open ending.

Connecting Narrative Writing Back to Close Reading

Despite being a creative assignment, this exercise actually rewards close reading more than it might initially appear, since the strongest continuations draw on small details from throughout the novel, not just the final chapter, to build a believable extension of Jonas's story.

Debriefing this assignment with a class discussion afterward, comparing the range of imagined endings and which textual details different students drew on, reinforces that even creative writing benefits from careful, attentive reading of the source material.