Recommends a series of questions, activities, and guidelines to make free writing more productive and generative. (MS)

Lists eight ways to develop a topic for a composition. (DF)

Presents a brainstorming aid for students whose technical writing assignments focus on real problems they must discover on their own. (SRT)

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)

Offers a nonverbal prewriting strategy, writer-based sketches, intended to help students turn their thoughts into words. (MS)

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)

Creative problem-solving can be used successfully in the writing classroom, for the problem-solving process involves three distinctive stages of thinking activity that remarkably parallel the prewriting steps in the composing process. Similar stages include: (1) data generation and preparation to write; (2) data manipulation and incubation; and…

Describes a method for teaching students to connect their ideas causally or logically in their writing by talking about the ideas before beginning to write. (HTH)

Research suggests that good writers differ from poor writers. Teachers who develop prewriting exercises, emphasize multiple draft assignments, help the student think about revision, and evaluate the product can help undergraduates write and think more clearly. (Author/AM)

Describes different types of prewriting activities such as "brainwriting," visual synectics, and relational algorithms. (JL)

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…

Suggests the value of a prewriting sheet which asks remedial students to specify an occasion, audience, and purpose for each of their one-paragraph papers. (DD)

Suggests clustering can help students of any ability level draw upon latent images and ideas, generate more original sentences, and experiment with metaphor and simile. (MS)

Suggests a prewriting exercise in characterization using the legend genre as framework. (HTH)

Urges that the English teacher learn and use in class the formal outline to help students learn thinking skills that will help in composition and in computer programing. (CRH)