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Writing Process: Pre-Writing Resources
exploring techniques that help our student writers to plan better rough drafts
My experience with writing in my classes often failed to reach my expectations for myself as a writing teacher and for my students as writers. Many students would rush through writing assignments, not even completing most steps of the process. I discovered that I needed to get my students to buy-in to the process so they could see the value in it. It was evident that I needed to guide my students through the process and get them engaged with their writing. While reading a book called Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg, I ran across something that really made me think about what goes through our mind when beginning a piece of writing: "When I teach a beginning class, it is good. I have to come back to the beginner’s mind, the first way I thought and felt about writing. In a sense, that beginner’s mind is what we must come back to every time we sit down and write. There is no security, no assurance that because we wrote something good two months ago, we will do it again. Actually, every time we begin, we wonder how we ever did it before. Each time is a new journey with no maps." If what Natalie Goldberg says is true, then a freshman sitting in my English 1-2 class, who is already feeling nervous and self-counscious, is feeling even more insecure about actually taking the step to write something down on paper that is his or her own thoughts, feelings, and emotions. I didn’t need much more convincing that I was going to have to make this as easy on the students as possible. I needed to help them in the beginning stages of writing when they are feeling no assurance that they will be able to write anything that they feel is good writing. In Donald M. Murray’s 1972 article, “Teach Writing as a Process Not Product,” he focuses on how teachers can emphasize the process of writing as being the most important aspect, not the product. He states, “Prewriting usually takes about 85% of the writer’s time”. If prewriting is to take about 85% of the total process time, then this is the part of the process students need the most guidance with. When students spend some time thinking about what they will write, which words they will use, and how they will use those words to say what they want to say, they see that their writing turns into something in which they can take ownership and feel good about. My purpose at this webpage is to provide ideas to help teachers guide students through this very important part of the writing process so that your students can begin to see themselves as writers. I hope you will find some useful ideas here that will help engage your students during the very beginning stages of the process. Want to participate in this developing WritingFix page? If you have a favorite original lesson or resource for teaching pre-writing to your students that you would be willing to let us post here, we will send you one of the NNWP Print Publications in exchange for us being allowed to feature it. Contact us at webmaster@writingfix.com for details or to summarize a pre-writing idea that you'd be willing to send us. |
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Designing High Quality Advanced Organizers |
Six Pre-Writing Resources from the NNWP's
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A teacher at one of our inservices once made an interesting point about graphic organizers when explaining why he didn't hand them out to his students anymore. He said, "In real life, no one hands you a graphic organizer." The trouble with that idea is that most students don't have enough experience with organizing writing to do it without a tool that helps them be successful. As adults, we don't need graphic organizers most of the time to write, but students aren't that lucky. Why not hand out graphic organizers the first half of the year, explaining to your students that during the second half they will be required to design their own? This will certainly teach your students to look more closely at the ones you provide, and it set them up to think about organizing writing as a future life-skill. We talk a lot about designing quality graphic organizers (or advanced organizers) at our lesson-building workshops for teachers. For too many teachers, this is what they consider to be enough of a graphic organizer for pre-writing:
This is a start, but where's the organized part? Clusters and lists are generally not very organized. We stress that an effective graphic organizer should do two things: 1) allow students to explore either ideas or word choice options for the writing assignment (like the cluster above does) but also 2) provide an opportunity for the students to begin organizing the ideas in preparation to write about them. Most graphic organizers we see don't address this second part. Another element lacking from a lot of the graphic organizers we see is that they don't focus on a specific writing skill. G.O.s can (and should) do more than help students finish a piece of writing; they should help students understand and use a skill that real writers use. One of the activities we do at our workshops is challenge teachers to think about skill-based graphic organizers. In groups we challenge them to design an advanced organizer that would help student writers be successful with the following skills during the pre-writing step:
When our teachers begin to design graphic organizers that are skill-based, they begin to realize that they have a lot to discover about designing better graphic organizers. We also spend a lot of time showing our teachers how to use Microsoft Word's table-making tools to create more effective graphic organizers. To learn how to make tables, we assign them the task of recreating one of the following graphic organizers in small groups. For this task, the whole group figures out how to recreate the graphic organizer together, but each group member sits at a different computer and re-creates their own copy; if they get stuck, they ask the group for help, only requesting help from the instructor if the whole group can't figure out how to do something. Group members usually have enough basic knowledge of Microsoft Word and its table feature to learn to recreate these explicit graphic organizers without needing the teacher to show them too much.
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In the trait guide's Idea Development Section, Jamie found a variety of pre-writing resources designed to help students pre-plan more developed (and organized) ideas for their writing assignments. Below, you will find four excellent pages from the Going Deep... Guide, and you will find full-page graphic organizers inspired by these pages. If you'd like information on how to purchase the entire 196-page guide, click here.
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Seven Pre-Writing Resources from |
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In 2004, the SWG underwent a revision, which aligned the guide's original content to Nevada's new academic standards. A generous grant from the Walter S Johnson Foundation paid for the revision and distribution of the new guide. In 2007, the guide was printed for the last time. The rising price of paper inspired the NNWP to began posting the SWG's contents on-line here at WritingFix.
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