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from the structure and security of following the writing process in their writing.“
Stages of the Writing Process by Gardner and Johnson (1997)

Many students find writing to be a daunting task. They are easily overwhelmed by the most rudimentary of
writing assignments and need you, their teacher, to provide steady guidance. As quoted above, students
require the structure and security of a regimented process to help them get started. By teaching the
following foundational elements of the writing process, you will give your students the tools they need to
tackle whatever writing assignment they are given with confidence.

Prewriting
By bracketing out concern for anything other than generating ideas, good prewriting facilitates creativity
and lateral thinking. Even though the process is designed to elicit free-flowing ideas, it’s important that
prewriting have some structure. Otherwise, it can degenerate into unfocused daydreaming.

The best way to give structure to the prewriting process is to take notes on the ideas that are being
generated. The following are some note-taking methods specific to the prewriting process that highlight
the relationships between ideas and increase the likelihood of producing useful material.

Brainstorming

Brainstorming is the process of generating ideas and information based on word associations.
Brainstorming involves generating a list of words, phrases, names, and anything else that comes to a
writer’s mind when he or she thinks about the topic at hand. Some students may balk at having to
brainstorm, but it’s critical that you reinforce the idea that this is an important part of the writing process,
and one that will make the actual writing that much easier.

During brainstorming, writers don’t need to worry about the utility of the items on their lists. Brainstormed
lists serve as raw material for the writing process; the main goal is to think of as many ideas as possible.
After brainstorming a list, it’s helpful to go back through the list and try to group similar items together.
After grouping the items, try to create a label for each group.

For example, if students are assigned a paper on a famous person, some brainstorming topics might
include:

• Name of the person
• When they were born
• Major events in their life
• What made them famous
• When did they live and or die
• How did they change society

Free-Writing

Free-writing is an unstructured, associative form of writing that closely mirrors the process of
brainstorming. The idea behind free-writing is to designate a period of time—say ten minutes—during
which you won’t stop writing, even forcing yourself to continue when you feel like you have no ideas.

Like brainstorming, free-writing allows a writer to focus on generating ideas without worrying about style
and grammar. There’s no need to censor ideas; the goal is to write whatever you’re thinking and sort it out
later.

Once the designated period of time has elapsed, the writer can choose to read through the free-writing,