Improve students' writing skills and boost their assessment scores while adding arts education, creativity, and fun to your writing curriculum. With this vibrant resource, improving writing skills goes hand-in-hand with improving test scores. Students learn how to use acting and visualization as prewriting activities to help them connect writing…

Argues that prewriting is the most important skill to emphasize and practice extensively in basic writing classes. Describes basic writers as almost universally neglecting prewriting activities. Suggests some guidelines for teaching prewriting effectively. (HB)

This essay is intended to assist teachers in helping students develop the art of resume writing. The curriculum outlined is based on prewriting, writing, and rewriting and on using sample entry-level resumes to illustrate basic resume do's and don'ts. The first section outlines the importance of good resumes and the pitfalls of having vocational…

This paper discusses the use of film in teaching the composing process to students. Beginning with a description of the composing process in general, it continues with a discussion of problem-solving, composing, and film, using "The Shopping Bag Lady" as an illustrative film. This is followed by a consideration of how to use film to generate form…

Presents a procedure writing students can use, either singly or in groups, to exploit the general knowledge they have of common objects, artifacts, and institutions. Describes the use of a matrix to integrate knowledge about realms, or areas of interest, and concerns, or problems. (MM)

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)

Picture books provide effective models for student writing. For purposes of organization and writing lessons, the models found in picture books may be divided into three groups: (1) language patterns; (2) story structures; and (3) literary elements. Language patterns include repetitive sentence patterns, verse forms, word patterns, and cultural…

Describes five prewriting activities for courses that emphasize writing and deemphasize discussion of literature. The activities focus on organization and theme statement so that students think about every possible subject, theme, and approach. (HTH)

Discusses four stages through which writers pass during prewriting. Offers ways of helping students pass through these stages so that they can begin to organize their writing more effectively. (RL)

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)

Recommends using Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives as an aid to involve students in their writing and to overcome stilted diction while discovering that writing is a process. (CRH)

Argues that emphasis on process has reduced the amount of time teachers spend teaching basic editing skills. Offers eight suggestions for incorporating instruction in punctuation into a process approach to writing. (MS)