Whether novice or experienced, writers must come to terms with the daunting task of filling up a blank page, or screen, in an effort to produce writing. Student writers are no different. They enter teachers' classes having confronted similar difficulties with discovering what it is they want to say. In seeking to help students, they devote…

In second-language writing, assessment has traditionally focused on the written products and how well (or badly) students perform in writing. Teachers dominate the assessment process as testers, while students remain passive testees. Assessment is something teachers "do to" rather than '"with" students, mainly for…

Argues that outlining should not be abandoned as a means to teaching students how to organize their thoughts because it can be an invaluable tool in certain circumstances. Describes in outline form how one teacher goes about teaching outlines to her students. (TB)

Recommends adding formal training in note taking to the high school English curriculum to help students master the skills of abstracting major ideas from texts, summarizing facts, and paraphrasing materials. Suggests an approach to note taking. (RBW)

Describes how studying under Ken Macrorie led one high school English teacher to use freewriting as a prewriting activity in her classroom. (ARH)

Describes an exercise that affords students the opportunity to articulate their ideas before a group of peers who challenge one another to clarify generalizations. (RAE)

Describes several strategies to help journalism students avoid "writer's block," including front-end editing, brainstorming, clustering, notetaking, freewriting, and journal writing. (MM)

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

Intended for junior high and high school writing instructors, this booklet provides prewriting activities designed to help students master the thinking strategies essential to effective written communication. The first portion of the booklet discusses theory and research on the role of thinking strategies in writing and gives an overview of the…

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)

Describes nine prewriting activities using supermarket tabloids as the model for producing a newspaper on mythology. (RS)

Discusses how writing instruction can help students move from the expressive writing typical of first drafts to writing that can be presented to discriminating audiences. (MM)

Points out the value of responding to students' first drafts of papers, outlines a three-step approach for doing so, and gives five examples of such an approach. (JL)

Suggests teaching a variety of sentence beginnings in writing instruction. (AEA)