This book explains how to work with ideas to hone them into words, providing techniques and exercises for brainstorming, choosing the right approach, working with an unknown or boring assigned topic, and selecting the best point of view. It presents 10 steps, noting related problems: (1) "Decide on Size" (no specific length is assigned);…

This lesson uses the informational power of the Internet for a prewriting activity. Through various Internet sites, students gather information about the history and celebration practices associated with Veterans Day. Following the prewriting activity, students write content-rich poems that honor veterans. During the 45-minute prewriting session,…

Argues against requiring students to prepare formal outlines before writing papers and recommends instead that students prepare the rough, idiosyncratic lists that working writers use before they write. (AEA)

Explores the similar and different ways that reading and writing influence consciousness. Summarizes the relationship between reading and writing as meditation--a way of modifying inner speech or composing in the mind. (HTH)

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)

Suggests that using a formula approach to constructing topic sentences can serve to motivate student writing and to inform students about the methods used to produce mass circulation fiction and tabloid writing. (AEA)

Discusses motivation, ritual, perception, language and perception, heuristics, investigation, and character as a catalogue of inventionist themes and explains their potential applications to the teaching of writing. (JL)

Examines the evidence for both the linguistic and rhetorical hypotheses about writers' planning and presents new research on episodic patterns within the writing process itself. Uses protocol analysis to look at the content and nature of writers' plans. (HOD)

Includes nine articles on the subject of writing and how it's taught: "Aspects of Literacy: A Statistical Viewpoint" (Chester, and Holden); "Writing the Austradon" (Moore); "What Next? Working with Novice Writers" (Kelly); "Text Analysis: A Practical Teaching Tool" (Hazell); "Different Text Types: An…

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)

Writing, and the vocabulary building that goes with it, is a more complex process than merely putting words on a page. In the process of acquiring vocabulary, for example, students need to understand not just what individual words mean but also which combinations of these words in sentences or paragraphs convey a meaningful message to the reader…

Computers, if programed to respond to writer-generated content with heuristic strategies, can guide the writer in the prewriting stage. Heuristics are problem solving strategies that can aid the writer in exploring a topic either through a systematic posting of relevant questions or through an unsystematic process of free-association. To date the…

Composition instruction directed at native speakers of English has focused on the composed product rather than the composing process. The teaching of English as a second language (ESL) students has had a similar emphasis, with much classroom time devoted to sentence manipulation and usage exercises. Such exercises have little effectiveness in…

To develop a theory of invention that would include both generation and selection of material for written composition, the four major current theories of invention were considered. Since only one--prewriting--included a selection component and was limited in several ways, a psychotherapeutic theory--focusing--was adapted to the composing process…