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 how students can be encouraged to draw upon their imaginations and upon their observations of and speculations about the outside world to write their own short fiction. (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)

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…

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…