Effectiveness of Prewriting Strategies as a Function of Task Demands

College students wrote a short informative essay calling for analytical thinking. The students either began drafting without any prewriting time (control), first prepared a hierarchical written outline (outline), or first prepared a visual network of ideas and their relations (cluster). Task demands were also varied. The writing task either demanded generation and organization of ideas (topic), demanded organization but provided suggested ideas (topic and ideas), or provided both ideas and a possible organizational scheme (topic, ideas, and organization)