Process Writing: Teaching Organization and Structure

1. Process Writing: Teaching Organization and Structure Hiram College WAC Adapted from Lindemann, Tate, Corbett and Myers

2. Process – A New Skill • “Despite the fact that most teachers provided models for writing [in high school], few arranged for students to read each other's papers and make suggestions and improvements. Our analysis found little process writing occurring in classrooms, in contrast to calls in the literature for experiences with brainstorming, revising, and publishing .” -- Lisa Scherff and Carolyn Piazza

3. Elements of the Writing Process • Prewriting • Translating and processing the prompt • Formulating ideas • Gathering evidence • Writing notes, an outline or a plan • Writing • Developing and fleshing out points in plan • Struggling with problems—composing • Sculpting acceptable form and look • Shaping and Revising • Reworking essay on structural and sentence level • Adding necessary and removing unnecessary elements • Polishing

4. Not a Stage Model

5. Projective Structuring Projective Structuring requires writers to: • Think of needs of reader • Think of demands and criteria of assignment • Think of their ideas and responses and how those responses fit the needs of the reader and demands of the assignment.

6. Prewriting • Responding to the Prompt • Brainstorming and Clustering • Freewriting • Journals • Models

7. Shaping Discourse • Discovering Form • Blocking • Getting physical with the draft

8. Paragraphing • Traditional Views of the Paragraph • How Writers Paragraph

9. Resources • Lindemann, Erika. A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. Print. • Perl, Sandra. “Understanding Composing.” Teaching Composition 3rd ed. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008. Print. • Scherff, Lisa and Carolyn Piazza. “The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: A Survey of High School Students' Writing Experiences.” Research in the Teaching of English39. 3 (Feb., 2005): 271-304. Print.