During writing conferences, many teachers impose their own ideas and attitudes on the student's essay, and often are not sure how else to help their students arrive at changes that will improve their writing. Understanding or assessment of a student's prior knowledge about the topic can be very helpful to a teacher in shaping the conference and paper under discussion. Brainstorming is a powerful prewriting activity that helps students draw upon previous experience to discover what might be relevant about their writing topic. Students who know little about a topic need a special kind of conference that focuses directly on building the ideas or concepts being written about and provides suggestions for sources of further information or alternative topics. When students do know something about a topic but have not thought it through, the first draft often serves as a way to develop ideas. In this case, a productive conference might focus on what the student knows about the topic and how aspects of that knowledge are related to each other. A conference focusing on the linguistic or organizational aspects of a paper can be helpful for students who know a good deal about a topic and have thought it through already. (HTH)