For use by teachers in helping students become better writers, this booklet describes and illustrates cognitive mapping, a prewriting technique that helps students combine their verbal and visual skills in order to produce ideas and to plan stories, plays, reports, or essays. The first section of the booklet discusses the interrelations between writing and thinking and explains how mapping can help students recall, organize, and structure their ideas. The second section, which comprises the major portion of the booklet, (1) explains how to make a cognitive map; (2) demonstrates how mapping can integrate the functions of the two hemispheres of the brain; (3) compares mapping to outlining; (4) illustrates ways that it can be used in planning a letter, autobiography, story, oral composition, research paper, or play; (5) lists suggestions for other uses of mapping in writing instruction; and (6) presents maps of works by professional writers. (FL)