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The blank page can be one of the most intimidating parts of writing. Whether you’re a full-time author, a journalist, or a student with an essay assignment, looking at that empty document when you don’t know where to start can be frustrating.
What if there were a magic solution to take away the blank page? There is: Prewriting, the first step of the writing process. Today, we’ll explain what prewriting is, why it’s an important step to teach your students to improve their writing, and strategies and techniques to help you start teaching students how to do prewriting on their own.
Prewriting is the first stage of the writing process. It’s when writers can plan what they want to write, organize their thoughts, set goals, and explore topics. Prewriting isn’t supposed to be polished or even grammatically correct. It can be artful, chaotic, or even messy.
This step takes place before drafting and can take as much or as little time as you need to get your ideas together and feel confident before starting a rough draft. Compared to the rest of the writing process, prewriting often takes more time than copyediting and publishing, but less time than drafting and revising.
[Why is prewriting important?](id-why)
Prewriting is a critical step in the writing process that students shouldn’t rush through or skip. The benefits of setting aside dedicated time for prewriting include:
Eliminating the blank page
Starting a draft can be the most challenging part of the writing process. When staring at words and phrases that can spark ideas rather than that blank page, it’s easier to create sentences and paragraphs that share your thoughts and research on a topic. Planning and prewriting allow you to generate these ideas in a relaxed way and get content on paper without worrying about perfection.
Organizing your thoughts
Prewriting helps you see where your ideas come together and relate to each other. It helps you decide in what order you should share ideas. Prewriting strategies can also help you decide what your audience wants to know about the topic and how that ties into what you can share with them.
Generating Ideas
Sometimes, writing one thought on paper can help you generate many more new ideas. As you see things come together on a page, you may see new angles from which you can cover a topic. Once you get going, you can add as many ideas to your prewriting page as possible!
Deepening understanding of a topic
Prewriting can set you up to deepen your understanding of a topic. It can directly lead into a research phase where you dive deep into some of your questions. The more research you do, the more confident you may feel when starting your rough draft.
Improving the clarity and cohesion of ideas
Prewriting allows you to spill all your ideas on paper and look for patterns. Are some of your ideas too similar? How do they connect? What can you combine into one idea to streamline your writing? If you skip this stage, your first draft may be muddled and require a lot of editing or revising to weed out things you could have noticed during prewriting.
Increasing efficiency and confidence when drafting
Having a plan can help you feel more confident when you start writing. You know where you’re going and have a general idea of what you want to say. Prewriting also helps you be more efficient when you write. It keeps you on topic and allows you to work section by section or question by question to cover all your ideas logically.
Considering the audience’s needs
Prewriting can also help you understand your audience. During this step, you can think about who you’re writing for and what they want to know. It can help you decide everything from the topic to the thesis, the tone, and even the piece's organization.
[8 prewriting strategies](id-strategies)
Choosing a prewriting technique and strategy depends on the writer, the project, and sometimes the topic. Explore the different types of prewriting strategies you can teach your students. And for even more resources, check out our Newsela ELA text set on the writing process. Articles in this text set about writer’s block may help your students better understand the prewriting stage and strategies they can use.
Light purple background with the title "8 prewriting strategies for students." The image lists eight strategies, each with a purple checkmark: Brainstorming, Freewriting, Looping, Journaling, Clustering or mind mapping, Question generation, Listing, and Outlining. There is a lightbulb illustration and the Newsela Writing logo.
1. Brainstorming
Brainstorming is helpful for quick idea generation. To brainstorm during prewriting, students can write down all their ideas on a topic as they come up with them. Brainstorming is typically a quick exercise that isn’t meant to be polished. No ideas are bad; if they come to mind, you can add them to your page or document.
For example, let’s say your students have to do a research project on their favorite author. The brainstorm session may include writing down the names of all their favorite authors, what your students know about those people and their books, and what questions they would like to ask the authors if they ever met in person. All these ideas would go into one document, or audio or video file.
Brainstorming may incorporate other prewriting strategies, like freewriting, clustering, or listing. Read on to learn more about these strategies.
2. Freewriting
Like brainstorming, freewriting allows students to put all their ideas on a topic on paper. The difference is that freewriting is typically more structured than a brainstorming session. Typically, the first step of freewriting is setting a timer for a period, like five minutes. During that time, you write continuously about your topic without stopping.
While freewriting, students shouldn’t worry about spelling, grammar, or punctuation. They should keep writing anything, even if they run out of ideas on their topic. Even writing your name, a repeated word, or nonsense could spark a new idea you can get down on paper.
Like brainstorming, freewriting can help bust through writer’s block by getting words on the page, even if those words don’t appear in your final draft. The following is an example of what freewriting about author Rick Riordan might look like:
“Rick Riordan wrote the Percy Jackson series. I don’t know how old he is or where he was born. I’ll have to look that up for my paper. Annabeth was my favorite character in the first book. I wonder why he chose that name. I wonder if it has something to do with Greek mythology. I should look that up, too.”
3. Looping
Looping is an extended freewriting activity. To start, students can have a general freewriting section. When the time is up, they can review what they wrote and look for themes, groups, or connections amongst their ideas.
Next, students can start a new timed freewriting session and use one of the identified groups or themes as their starting point. Students can repeat this process as many times as they want or need to get as specific about their content topic as necessary.
4. Journaling
Journaling is the ongoing process of writing down thoughts, questions, and ideas when you have them so you can refer back to them later. It can be a less intense version of freewriting that happens over time rather than in short, timed blocks.
Journaling may include other prewriting techniques like clustering, question generation, listing, or outlining. It could also include drawings, photos, or other visuals to spark ideas. Like during freewriting and looping, spelling, grammar, and punctuation don’t matter in journaling.
Encourage students to carry a journal with them and write when inspiration strikes. Printing out and sharing journaling worksheets to keep in the classroom can also give students a dedicated place to write down their ideas throughout the school day. An example of a student’s journal entry on an author may read:
5. Clustering or mind mapping
Clustering and mind mapping are visual prewriting strategies focusing on a central word or concept. When you cluster, you connect words, thoughts, ideas, or questions to your main topic using lines and circles. You can even make subsections of your map to dive deeper into secondary ideas.
Question generation is a prewriting strategy that encourages students to write a list of topic-relevant questions. To get started, you can use the 5Ws and 1H questions (Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How). Students can view this strategy as a pre-interview. They can treat themselves as a topic journalist trying to prep for an interview with their subject.
Question generation is a great prewriting activity for setting up research. After creating your question list, you can move on to reading sources, watching interviews, and conducting searches with the questions you want to answer already in mind. The output of a question generation session on an author may look like:
7. Listing
Like question generation and brainstorming, listing invites students to write down their ideas, thoughts, and questions on a topic, but to add each new item on its own line on the page. Listing and outlining may combine to get ideas down and organize them for more cohesion and clarity. An example of a list activity for authors may look like:
Rick Riordan
Children’s book author
Wrote the Percy Jackson series
Need to look up what other series he writes
Wonder what other jobs he had besides being a writer?
Did he go to college?
What was his major?
8. Outlining
Outlining is a more logically structured list. It includes numbered, lettered, or bulleted sections that group ideas and order them in a specific way. Outlining can help you group ideas by theme, idea, or argument. They’re most useful when writing something that must achieve a specific goal or answer a specific question. Outlining can help you plan toward meeting that objective and see how the organization will make it clear to the reader.
When outlining, students are often also researching their topic. They’re taking ideas and information they find from various sources and deciding where best to introduce and share them with the audience throughout the piece.
You can also refer back to your outline after writing your piece as a reverse check to ensure you’ve covered all the main points in your draft. An outline for the fictional author research project may look like:
[Which prewriting strategy should students choose?](id-which)
Prewriting is most successful when a writer finds a technique that works for them. The trick to finding a good prewriting strategy is discovering which one helps you process information the best, which can be different for everyone. For example, those who like to intake information visually may like mind maps, and people who crave more structure might like outlines.
It’s important for students to know all the options available to them for prewriting strategies and try them out. They may identify a few preferred methods and can use the one that best fits the piece they need to write.
[What tools can students use for prewriting?](id-tools)
There are a variety of tools students can use to start the prewriting process. Explore some of the options you can have available in your classroom that they can use:
Pencil and paper: Your students likely already have these supplies available to start working right away.
Digital tools: Word processing documents, spreadsheets, and notes apps can help students record their ideas on a device. Audio and video recorders can also help if they’d rather talk than type or draw.
Worksheets and graphic organizers: These tools can help guide the prewriting process and show students where or how to record information. Try our diary, web chart, or essay outline graphic organizers to get started.
Online tools: Interactive online instructional tools like Formative can help you blend all of these methods by housing all students’ writing or recording in one place. Use a variety of question types and response methods, and even make graphic organizers interactive.
[What comes next in the writing process?](id-process)
Prewriting is the first stage of the writing process, but students may want to know what comes next before they get started.
Some projects may combine topic research with prewriting, while others make that the next step. Students will take their generated ideas and questions and use reputable sources to collect the information they need.
After prewriting and research comes drafting, where students write their first rough draft of the piece. Prewriting specifically prepares students to write their first rough draft. It lets them take the ideas, questions, and snippets they uncovered and use them to tell a story, answer a question, or argue a point of view.
Next are reviewing and revising, where students do self-reflections, collect peer feedback, and confer with their teachers to analyze their writing and make changes to make it better.
Finally, polishing, also sometimes called copyediting, and publishing. In these steps, students clean up their final draft to make it ready for an audience, and then share that final copy, whether by turning in the assignment or putting it out into the world in another way.
[Prewriting FAQs](id-faq)
Have more questions about using prewriting in the classroom? We’ve got answers!
What prewriting strategies are most effective?
No single prewriting strategy is most effective for every writer or project. Knowing what prewriting methods exist and being able to test them out on a variety of projects can help students figure out what works best for them.
Experimentation is key, and students might even find themselves blending strategies to get their best idea generation and organization. For example, they may turn their clusters into an outline, or turn their freewriting into a mind map..
Some strategies may be better suited for different purposes. If students are struggling to pick a prewriting strategy, make the following suggestions based on their needs:
How can I encourage students to ask questions and generate ideas during prewriting?
There are many ways you can model asking questions for idea generation. Try these options:
Model the strategy: Model what the question generation prewriting strategy looks like to the whole class. Modeling helps make this abstract concept more concrete when they see the thinking patterns they can follow.
Lean on the 5Ws and 1H: Ask students to question who, what, when, where, why, and how on their topic to get started. You can also model how to make these generic questions more specific to their topic and help them uncover the information they need to know before they write.
Ask audience-centric questions: Ask students to anticipate questions their audience might want answered. This can help them find areas that may need more research or explanation.
How can I keep students motivated and engaged while prewriting?
Students may want to skip over the prewriting or any planning stages and get right to writing. But this step is crucial to making the later steps of the writing process easier. Here are some ideas to help your students stay motivated and engaged during prewriting:
Introduce it as a fun activity: If you frame prewriting as a fun activity, students will see it the same way. Remind them this is a time to be creative, messy, and thoughtful. If it sounds like something they want to do, there’s a better chance they’ll stay engaged in the process.
Let them choose the best strategy: After showing students all the available prewriting strategies and how to combine methods, let them choose what works best for their working style and project.
Use technology and tools: Prewriting is a very creative step in the process. Let students use art supplies to draw their clusters or incorporate their favorite useful tech tools. This can encourage excitement and engagement around this writing stage.
Allow collaboration: Let students prewrite in groups or talk about their prewriting at the end of the process. When they can do this step with friends, it can make them more excited to work on this stage of the writing process.
Should I assess or grade students on their prewriting?
Prewriting is meant to be an idea generation stage. It’s not supposed to be polished, grammatically correct, or ready for publication. While you can give students completion points for doing a prewriting activity, you shouldn’t grade this work by a rubric or any finished writing standards.
Instead of offering a grade for prewriting, try lower-stakes feedback or conferences instead. When you confer with students about their prewriting strategies and outputs, you can:
Get a firsthand look at how they’re using prewriting strategies and which ones might work best for them.
Learn more about their ideas for the pieces and early plans for organizing the information.
Answer questions they have about prewriting, idea generation, or the next steps in writing.
Guide students by providing additional modeling to make this stage of the writing process easier.
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Students can use these prewriting exercises outside the program to help them prepare to write a variety of content, from argumentative essays to literary analyses.
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