Prewriting is everything that happens from the time that students first know they are going to write until they begin the first sentence. Including more prewriting is one of the easiest ways to impove writing instruction in most secondary classrooms. Many high school teachers skip this step completely and simply assign an essay.

Consider adding any of the following:

Ask students to brainstorm ideas on the topic with a partner for 3 minutes.

Brainstorm on the board or overhead projector.

Cluster on the board or use computer with projector.

Use a variety of graphic organizers:

• Bank of Graphic Organizers: SCORE (The Schools of California Online Resources for Education) provides many organizers with both a teacher version with instructional suggestions and a student version ready to print.
• Graphic Organizer Generator: Create your own graphic organizers using this online tool.
• Tools for Reading, Writing and Thinking: These graphic organizers have been collected by Greece Central Schools and can be downloaded and printed.
• Inspiration: Inspiration is a computer program that can be used to cluster ideas and then with the click of a button the ideas are transformed into an outline. The program comes with many prewriting templates including one for persuasive writing.