Writing processes and writing skills are highly compatible, but only if "writing skills" are defined as genuinely helpful learning strategies rather than prescriptive techniques or isolated forms and rules. Increased skill is a product of meaningful practice, not prescriptive instructions or isolated drills. In the present context, the term strategic writing instruction refers to the teaching and acquisition of rhetorical and self-regulatory strategies for use during writing processes, strategies that can be defined as "behaviors and thoughts that a learner engages in during learning and that are intended to influence the learner's encoding processes" (Weinstein and Mayer). Two examples of strategic writing instruction should help to explain this important concept. In the first example, a ninth-grade teacher gives her students a writing sample and after asking them to write a composition in response to it, administers a questionnaire on the writing process. She finds, interestingly, that the good writers instinctively follow a writing process that the poorer writers do not. She therefore works with the poorer writers individually to help them understand the process behind writing. In a second example, however, a teacher following a similar process finds that some of his students cannot grasp writing processes explained verbally. He therefore uses a computer to convey the same concepts spatially. Through this process, a student, using arrows, learns that all ideas in a paragraph must be connected to the topic sentence, or as he refers to it, the "top sentence." (Contains 14 references and 1 figure.) (TB)