Presents a procedural model for use as a prewriting strategy to help students "decenter" or distance themselves from their writing and avoid the generalities that characterize egocentric writing. The model provides opposing viewpoints in a student's analysis of problems or issues. (HTH)

Describes a "composing process paper" assignment designed to make students aware of their own writing processes and to teach important problem-solving skills. Provides a series of protocol questions students can discuss before writing descriptions of their individual writing processes. (HTH)

Adapts Edward de Bono's "Intermediate Impossible" strategy--for considering ideas that normally would be discarded as stepping-stones to new ideas--for use as a prewriting activity to enhance creative problem solving. (HTH)

Suggests using poetry's short short forms for a methodical and rapid series of writing assignments that emphasize both careful writing at the sentence level and overall planning and respect for form. (HTH)

Describes a teaching unit designed to help students discover the interaction of writer, subject, and audience. Reviews the major types of writing used in the unit and the various audiences for whom the students wrote. (FL)

Suggests activities for using newspapers in the composition classroom. Activities include using information from newspapers during the creative process, using journalistic style to illustrate composition techniques, and using the paper as a tool in learning how to evaluate writing. (HTH)

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

Offers an activity for use in helping students become aware of the importance of voice in writing and reading. (FL)

Describes a writing assignment in which students must complete a page of coherent prose using only one word containing the letter "n." The exercise serves as a prelude to the concepts of revision and of passive and active vocabularies. (HTH)

Explains how journal writing, taught with some direction, can guide students' writing and provide them with a sense of self-discovery. (HOD)

Provides a rationale for allowing students to write in journals that the teacher will never read. Suggests requiring students to write responses to their journal writing at the end of the semester, which would be shared with the teacher and the rest of the class. Includes a sample response. (HTH)

Describes assignments that integrate ideas from student journals into expository and deliberate essays. (HOD)

Presents eight writing assignments designed to help students write reports and letters for their future jobs. (HTH)

Presents an exercise that guides basic writing students in their choices, requiring them to make evaluative annotations of each sentence in the draft of a paragraph. Includes (1) a set of questions that incorporate criteria for a sound paragraph and serve heuristically for the revision of the draft, and (2) a student example of the procedure. (HTH)

Describes the evolution of a final examination for a writing course emphasizing the process approach, student conferences, and revision through successive drafts. Discusses student responses to the new exam format and includes one student's exam essay. (HTH)