Planning For Writing is it possible?

As writers in the school system we have always been taught that our exam productions are the more importance pieces of writing so if I ever attempted any prewriting exercise it was during that period that I took the need to become consciously aware of the fact that I should be investing in a prewriting strategy. Now what is pre writing you may query? Prewriting is the first stage of the writing process, typically followed by drafting, revision, editing and publishing. Elements of prewriting may include planning, research, outlining, diagramming, storyboarding or clustering. but to me it is more than just that it is thinking about writing being cognizant of the fact that you are not just undertaking a random task but are actively involved in creating something new and distinct, that is uniquely you.

I used to have poor prewriting skills, I brainstormed mine you but it seemed more like a 100 meter dash than the marathon that it should have been as I always had this eagerness to write and fear that I would never be able to finish on time which had been justified from time to time especially for English centered exams. So I usually ended with pieces that though had wonderful stories and components of a good piece but were continually hampered by poor mechanics because I never took the time to revise or properly structure what I was doing because I felt that I was competing with the clock. That I feel is a problem I feel that is wrong with our English classrooms where students are expected to work against a clock in class and out of class so that their main focus becomes not the craft that they attempting to learn but rather beating the clock.

One of the strategies that I enjoyed reading about as free writing , and I would recommend us as teachers going on practice to take the opportunity at least once to utilize this in the classroom , for I suppose if I had been introduced to this whilst at high school I might have been a more competent writer myself the focus is not on mimicking proper grammar and other conventions of writing but rather getting students into the mood of writing where they can generate a central theme or idea about the topic that there writing on or on the writing craft.

Another quite reasonable and useable idea in our local classroom is that visual representation of our ideas in an organized unit that we term graphic organizers. Theses I believe would allow for the teacher to facilitate the student in becoming better organizers so that there essays and compositions don’t read like the plot of a movie that is trying to convince you of hoe smart they are with all their twists and turns and flashback when all they do is turn something that was enjoyable and simple into caricature of itself. Through the use of pre writing strategies whilst at this institution SALCC I was able to transition from a reader who wrote into a writer who wrote with a purpose in mind, who am I writing for, will these be of interest to them am I writing to shock or inform? Am I writing solely to feed my ego as a writer, do I even recognize the people on the page, am I too attached to the characters that I can’t portray them anyway but positively are all questions that floated through my head . And I believe that if we are effective as teachers who are utilizing these pre writing strategies in our Language classrooms we can have our students trained in that approach where the approach writing as a writer first and as a reader second.it is through the pre-writing stage that we first gain a sense between our reading and writing and there is also the scaffolding necessary for students to critically examine the role as a writer and the text in that they realize it is healthy for self-criticism and diagnosis of their own work.

The purpose of these strategies are not just for fun but to ensure that our students employ them habitual and involuntary actions when they engage in the craft of writing, where background knowledge is activated so they see themselves as not writing in a vaccum as the Self - Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD preaches.Whilst the Cognitive Strategy Instruction (CSI): promotes the development of cognitive skills and processes to foster the learning of writing, it is a strategy that preaches a more independent and self reliant form of learning.