In this article, we describe student-centered routines that prepare students for success on ambitious text-based writing assignments. Based on research showing the important role that peer collaboration and classroom discussion play in developing students' thinking, these routines support students to 'try out' their ideas, learn from the…

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…

Offers a model of the writing process that is based on a review of recent research and the author's experiences as a writer and teacher. Explains these stages in the writing process: (1) prewriting, (2) exploratory writing, (3) developmental writing, (4) external revision, and (5) "last looks." (RL)

Describes a strategy for curriculum review that guides teachers through integrating technology into an existing curriculum plan. Based on a prewriting activity called SCAMPER, SCAMPER-CR offers a frame in which to review and revise existing units and unite literacy and technology. (LRW)

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

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)

Writers who double back to alter diction and syntax change their understanding of what it is they are saying, thereby clarifying their understanding and enhancing the discovery of new ideas. Revision, when taken this way, is often a form of invention. The difficulty in teaching revision is that writing has mistakenly been regarded as a linear…

Recommends adding formal training in note taking to the high school English curriculum to help students master the skills of abstracting major ideas from texts, summarizing facts, and paraphrasing materials. Suggests an approach to note taking. (RBW)

Presents a professional writer and writing teacher's ideas on writing and the writing process. (JL)

Adapts a classical concept to the composition classroom in a prewriting exercise which offers a wide range of benefits. (RS)

Offers seven planning and prewriting tips for the writing of award-winning proposals. (SR)

Describes method in which students write a draft requiring some writing skill before learning about that skill. Concludes that predrafting (1) enforces first-drafting; (2) shows students their natural writing abilities; (3) emphasizes discovery of substance first, rules and form second; (4) promotes an active student role; (5) arranges learning in…

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

Describes a prewriting technique in which technical writing students are given a tool or mechanism with which they are unfamiliar and told to figure out what the object is from a series of clues. (HTH)

Uses a broad definition of technical writing (practical writing) as a backdrop for two freshman composition courses. Introduces a student planning sheet for "thinking in"--examining the audience and purpose of a writing assignment. (RL)