Recommends a series of questions, activities, and guidelines to make free writing more productive and generative. (MS)

Adapts a classical concept to the composition classroom in a prewriting exercise which offers a wide range of benefits. (RS)

Lists eight ways to develop a topic for a composition. (DF)

Presents a brainstorming aid for students whose technical writing assignments focus on real problems they must discover on their own. (SRT)

Presents a relatively simple set of graphic methods that students can use to sort and organize information that traditional methods of outlining and organizing do not handle well. (JL)

Offers a nonverbal prewriting strategy, writer-based sketches, intended to help students turn their thoughts into words. (MS)

Describes five prewriting activities for courses that emphasize writing and deemphasize discussion of literature. The activities focus on organization and theme statement so that students think about every possible subject, theme, and approach. (HTH)

Professional speakers often use simple mental recipes to organize impromptu talks. The author taught these recipes to his high school composition students and used a timed trial format to give them practice in rapidly outlining their thoughts on a given topic. Thirteen of these recipes are provided. (SJL)

Writing strategies encourage beginning writers to collect, explore, and focus ideas. This paper presents a rationale for fusing the word processor with the writing process and offers a series of pre-writing strategies, such as brainstorming, clustering and chunk writing, to help learning-disabled writers begin writing. (Author/PB)

Describes a method for teaching students to connect their ideas causally or logically in their writing by talking about the ideas before beginning to write. (HTH)

Research suggests that good writers differ from poor writers. Teachers who develop prewriting exercises, emphasize multiple draft assignments, help the student think about revision, and evaluate the product can help undergraduates write and think more clearly. (Author/AM)

Describes different types of prewriting activities such as "brainwriting," visual synectics, and relational algorithms. (JL)

Describes a remedial writing class in which students learned organizational skills by cutting up and rearranging their own freewriting on a particular topic. (JL)

Suggests the value of a prewriting sheet which asks remedial students to specify an occasion, audience, and purpose for each of their one-paragraph papers. (DD)

Suggests clustering can help students of any ability level draw upon latent images and ideas, generate more original sentences, and experiment with metaphor and simile. (MS)