Donald Murray (2003) defines prewriting as “everything that takes place before the first draft…. [I]t includes the awareness of [the writer’s] world from which his subject is born. . . . [P]rewriting may include research and daydreaming, note-taking and outlining, title-writing and lead-writing” (p. 4). Similarly, Daiute (1985) considers “prewriting as a stage before the actual writing takes place when writers gather information, define the purpose and scope of the piece, and plan how to present it” (p. 73). Conners and Glenn (1999) further condense the definition of prewriting, announcing that prewriting refers to invention by prewriting theorists (p. 124). Prewriting, then, may suggest different activities and moments to different scholars and educators; for this text, prewriting refers to the invention stage, a stage where students brainstorm and generate ideas before the actual drafting of the paper takes place.

The significance of teaching invention in college writing courses has been addressedbyscholars such as Lauer (1970, 2004), Conners, and Glenn (1999). Conners and Glenn (1999) claim that “without invention, there can be no effective communication, and invention is the process that supplies writers and speakers with their content material” (p. 160). However, it is common that student writers tend to skip prewriting, jumping to writing but complaining about not knowing where to start. I often see students procrastinate until the night before papers are due to write unfinished products, and show reluctance to revise. These students unrealistically intend to produce an ideal essay in one or two hours and not have to fix anything later. For many of them, they care much about the final products they submit, which is not wrong, but their resistance to prewriting work can jeopardize their chance of writing an effective essay. Such neglect of prewriting can result from neglect of the writing process or from students’ anxieties and haste to finish the writing assignment as soon as possible. Omission of the prewriting stage, however, impedes students from articulating their arguments effectively in written words.

Invention is an essential writing stage which helps students to generate and organize ideas. Connors and Glenn (1999) specify that invention, as “a systematic search for arguments,” helps writers identify audiences, gather thoughts, collect materials, and clarify arguments (p. 160). They contend that “without invention, there can be no effective communication, and invention is the process that supplies writers and speakers with their content material” (p. 160). This potential to supply writers and speakers, ideally, should resolve students’ concern about not knowing where to start. The pedagogical significance of prewriting closely relates to the social nature of prewriting. Plato believes that “truth is sought through purely individual efforts,” stressing the recovery and expression of an individual’s inner (and perhaps latent) voice or innate cognitive structures (LeFevre, 1987, p. 1). In other words, the Platonic view of invention “encourages self expression and reassures writers of their inner resources” (p. 1). Such an understanding restricts invention to a process that occurs within “an introspective, isolated writer” (p. 13-14).

An isolated and introspective dialogue within the writer definitely helps him/her select information, digest information, and raise questions, but such functions should not lead people to believe that prewriting itself is asocial and anti-collaborative. As LeFevre (1987) says, invention can be regarded as “an unfolding, a manifestation of an individual’s ideas, feelings, voice, personality, and patterns of thought,” which, however, are developed socially over time rather than formed overnight in isolation (p. 1). In order to communicate feelings and thoughts, we rely on languages, which may be arbitrarily created but have unquestionably been socially constructed and interpreted. When humans comprehend these languages, they relate them to their own understandings shaped by their education, social experiences, and social interactions. Similarly, when they produce meanings through verbal or non-verbal means, they draw on their own cultural values and the given social contexts while addressing the social needs of audiences. Berger and Luckmann (1967) argue that all knowledge, including the most basic, taken-for-granted common sense knowledge of everyday reality, is derived from and maintained by social interaction (p. 143). If knowledge itself is negotiated by human interactions, knowledge building and sharing is a social process rather than an individual pursuit.

However, students who rush to finish their papers at the last minute fail to see the social characteristics of prewriting. They tend to either omit the prewriting stage or finish this stage individually, and eventually suffer from not having sufficient ideas to write. Treating prewriting as a social act, thus, informs the teaching of writing. With this text’s focus on YouTube technology, the following pages aim to showcase the collaborative and positive learning environment that YouTube technology potentially fosters when it is integrated into the prewriting stage.