Mitch Weisburgh
The STOP tip to help teach the writing process, from Steve Graham's blog article

The following technique is from Steve Graham's article, Research-Based Best Practices for Teaching Writing.

A technique that helps to teach the process of planning and drafting persuasive writing is called STOP:

Suspend your judgment and generate as many ideas on each side of the argument as you can;

Take a side;

Organize your notes and decide which ideas you are going to use to support your side and which ideas you are going to refute in your paper;

and keep Planning as you write. With this last step, writers continue to add, change, and even delete ideas from the initial plan while writing their persuasive papers.

This strategy can be taught to the whole class, small groups of students, or even an individual youngster. In any event, it is important to first describe the strategy, including how and why it works. Students also need to see how it is applied and practice using it, with the teacher's help, until they make it their own.

The process of teaching strategies like this is powerful and the most scientifically proven method in teaching writing. It is not much used in the classroom, however. We have found that only 10-15% of writing instruction time is spent on this process in elementary classrooms, while 50% is spent on grammar and other basic writing skills like spelling and handwriting, and just 20% on writing.