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

Suggests how to teach the writing of technical proposals; thoroughly discusses each section that should be included in such proposals. (TJ)

Provides an artistic prewriting activity to help students design the characters in the stories they write. (MG)

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

Describes a classroom assignment sequence in which students learn to think metaphorically about a scientific topic. Provides sample reading log questions and a prewriting worksheet. (MM)

Explains that understanding the art of persuasion can help students in evaluating what they hear, read, and write. Recommends four books that have good examples of persuasion and provides information on how to use prewriting as well as the reading writing relationship to construct arguments and write essays. (MOK)

Offers a strong rationale for the idea that the journey of writing good poetry begins on a path that infuses technology into the first stage of the writing process. Presents several ideas of ways to incorporate technology into the prewriting poetry experience. Concludes that by making technology an ingredient, the true potential for synergy…

Studied the influence of 4 different prewriting treatments on the quality of written discourse produced by fifth graders (96 in all) compared with writings of 24 students without prewriting instructions. Reading paired with prewriting before composing was found to be the most effective prewriting instructional strategy. (SLD)

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…

One challenge faced by many writing teachers is meeting the needs of students with varying skill and confidence levels. This article describes strategies used in a Composition and Rhetoric I course to meet the needs of basic and college-level writers. Sample assignments focusing on the theme of literacy and learning are provided, including an…

This study explored the influences of prewriting activities on the writing quality of male and female students with varying academic achievement across four grade levels. Participants were public school students in grades 4, 6, 9, and 11. At each grade level, students were assigned to one of two groups: writing with prewriting activities or…

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…