Teaching writing as a process is advocated to enhance a student's metacognitive skills and understanding of writing. The process can be used with students who have mild disabilities. Prewriting techniques such as clustering and color coding are explained, along with three teacher options for prewriting instruction to address class and student…

Generating writing ideas is often a serious obstacle for students. Some classroom techniques to help them out of this dilemma include word associating and self-questioning. Students can also construct a matrix chart with the subheadings from their information resources. Once ideas are generated, they can be arranged in appropriate presentation…

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…

Arguing that to consider only the writer's mental processes is an intellectualist view of the composing process that does not present a fully human way of knowing, this paper takes the position that the writer is more than a mind at work and that an account of the writer as knower must include a consideration of the interaction between mind and…

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)

Discusses the benefits of using a word processor for composition in the areas of prewriting, revising, proofreading, and printing. (AEA)

Facetiously examines heuristics in mumbling, staring, moving, doodling, and noise that can be used by writing teachers to help their writing students with rhetorical invention. (RL)

Offers a series of exercises designed to facilitate both discovery of content and its development into a written draft. (FL)

This study looks at the benefits of integrating visual art creation and the writing process. The qualitative inquiry uses student, parent, and teacher interviews coupled with field observation, and artifact analysis. Emergent coding based on grounded theory clearly shows that visual art creation enhances the writing process. Students used more…

By engaging in philosophical discussion in their writing, freshman composition students can discover that writing is a mediating tool between the self and the objective world, a means to examine the nature of reality and their thinking processes. Introducing philosophical issues opens the door for the investigation of difficult and abstract topics…

Technical writers involved in an institutional writing project need some way of viewing the raw material globally before writing. In this way they can build a framework which can be used for different types of information. This is accomplished through a task analysis meeting that highlights the following preparatory steps prior to writing: (1)…

Idea processors are computer programs that can aid the user in creating outlines by allowing the user to move, reorder, renumber, expand upon, or delete entries with a push of a button. The question is whether these programs are useful and should be offered to students. Theoretically, an idea processor prioritizes ideas by placing them in a…

In the absence of appropriate instruction, word processing programs in general and stylistic analysis programs in particular can reinforce the unproductive revision strategies of inexperienced student writers. For example, the predilection of inexperienced writers to see text as parts (words) rather than as whole (communication) can be reinforced…

The processes of prewriting, writing, revising, and proofreading are outlined in this four-page guide for writing center volunteers. Each section lists "things to remember" and provides ideas on "how to help students" when teaching these four stages of the writing process. (JW)

A synthesis of three different writing theories into one model for the writing process is given in this report and evidence is provided for various parts of the model from studies using different methods of investigation. The model developed contains three phases: (1) processing or whiting as discovery, including propositionalizing, subchunking,…