Background Study: The integration of mind maps as a prewriting activity has shown potential in enhancing students' writing skills, yet there is limited research focusing specifically on third-grade elementary students' descriptive narrative creative writing within technology-enhanced learning environments. The use of digital tools, such as writing…

Donald Graves's early professional books inspired Koshewa to look more deeply into student writing during the 1980s, and to value all phases of the writing process. Graves's perspective on uncovering and celebrating voice elevated Koshewa's writing instruction to a new plane. In this article, he writes about the impact that Donald Graves's work…

This article offers a first-person account of an academic writing workshop from the perspective of a participant. What is significant is that the workshop combines traditional and creative writing approaches to the teaching of academic writing. This provides new insights into a process of academic writing that can have a significant effect on the…

In the late 1970s, poet Lewis MacAdams labeled the many writers beginning to visit schools as "wild cards in the deck of education," bringing fresh possibilities to a somewhat staid curriculum. Now, nearly thirty years later, the authors wonder if it isn't time to renew the metaphor, as everyone strive to name what happens when poets bring their…

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…

Reports on the difficulties a teacher had while trying to compose her first poetry assignment at the Bread Loaf School of English. (RL)

The use of foreign language classroom conversation as a prewriting exercise, to help students discover composition topics, discuss the pros and cons, shape the narrative or thesis, and gather detail in a coherent way, launches the composition process and makes the homework of writing and proofreading more interesting and initially less difficult.…

Students who are not writing, or not writing well, may have a second chance to do so if they are able to receive the counsel of published writers to write before writing. These students should be told of the importance of prewriting. Most writers need time to wait for ideas to formulate. In this preparatory stage, writers feel four pressures that…

Describes how students can be encouraged to draw upon their imaginations and upon their observations of and speculations about the outside world to write their own short fiction. (AEA)

Designed to combine the science and the art of teaching composition, this series of assignments encourages junior high and high school writing students to explore tone, original visual images, point of view, and other literary techniques. One assignment asks students to write a number of paragraphs alternately using sarcasm, humor, melancholy, and…

Using data from 14 weeks of participant observation, this study examines three kindergartners' behaviors during common beginning literacy activities (i.e., copying and free composition). Results focus on the children's understanding of how written symbols and orally read messages are related and have implications for the use of teaching…

Proposes a heuristic to generate specific and vivid phrasing and to draw on the right hemisphere of the brain for the substance of the essay. Describes stages of process as DRAW (Delineate, Ruminate, Analogize, and Write). Emphasizes creative description and expressive language rather than generation of ideas. (JG)

Examines how different types of prewriting activities, teacher motivations, and classroom environments influence the student writing process. (MM)

The creative writing process, like any writing process, begins with a prewriting activity. Story starters are one such activity which teachers can use to begin the creative writing process with their students. For example, large cartoon-like characters made on an opaque projector can be used to initiate discussion. The second step requires a…

When handled well, description can give poetry and prose a quality of immediacy and accessibility by creating a dramatic context in which the writer's ideas and feelings can be shared by the reader. The use of perception stimulation can aid the student in producing effective images that lead to this dramatic context. To begin this learning…