Importance of Prewriting
When given a writing assignment, students often jump directly into writing and producing a rough draft. These students do not understand the significance of the planning stage in writing. To demonstrate why spending time on brainstorming, researching and outlining prior to writing, I show them the image of a home built on a crumbling foundation. Here is an example of one I could use: “Byzantine foundations” by Andrew Garton is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 . This leads to a discussion about the importance of building a solid foundation to ensure a strong structure can be laid on top, in the same way that writing requires a solid plan to ensure communication of organized and thoroughly explored ideas. Assignments are broken down into prewriting, writing, and editing/proofreading. We spend more time in class on the prewriting stage than on the other stages. Students earn grades for activities completed during the prewriting stage. This helps to stress its importance. Doing this results in students observing and reflecting, after they complete their final drafts, that they appreciated the extra preparation they undertook prior to writing full paragraphs. They recognize the value of research and organizing ideas into outlines.
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