prewriting for an essay includes organizing ideas

How to Prewrite: Prewriting Tips for Generating Ideas

All types of writers benefit from prewriting—the process that prepares you to write—whether you’re a student who’s drafting a thesis paper or a professional screenwriter preparing for an upcoming project. Integrating this step into your writing process strengthens your writing by helping you develop and think through your ideas. 

If you’re wondering why prewriting is important, consider Nobel Prize-winning  author Toni Morrison’s famous quote: 

“Writing is really a way of thinking—not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic, or just sweet.”

Although prewriting takes additional time, it helps you explain your points articulately and coherently when you’re ready to write. Give your writing extra polish Grammarly helps you communicate confidently Write with Grammarly

What is prewriting, and what is its purpose?

Prewriting typically happens before you buckle down to write the first draft . It’s a process that can be applied to any type of writing, such as a persuasive writing essay or a short story. 

It’s a brainstorming activity that lets you define the purpose of your writing. The exercise encourages you to formulate your ideas, identify what you already know, and understand what you need to further explore to effectively make your point. 

As a preliminary step in the overall writing process, it encourages you to think through your concepts so you avoid feeling stuck when you write. Prewriting can also help you determine a structure for your writing.  

With continued practice, prewriting can help you write faster and more cohesively. 

Prewriting vs. outlining

If the concept of prewriting sounds a lot like writing an outline , you aren’t wrong; outlining is technically one type of prewriting technique. However, outlining is generally more useful if you already have a grasp of your ideas and a plan for how you’ll approach your key points or arguments. 

An outline typically includes a thesis and a bullet point structure of your ideas in the order you’ll write them in your paper. Under each topic or subtopic, you might include details about the main idea or additional analysis.

For this reason, some writers create an outline after fleshing out their ideas using other types of prewriting approaches. Some popular brainstorming techniques that you can try before outlining include “listing” and “clustering.”

How to prewrite: 5 additional prewriting techniques

If the prewriting step feels daunting, ask yourself the following questions as a starting point: 

• What is the objective of this paper?
• What is my thesis? What argument or claim am I making?
• What assertions validate my thesis?
• Do I have supporting evidence for each point?
• How do I want to organize these points?

Being clear about your intentions ahead of time makes the prewriting process that much more productive. When you have a broad answer to these questions, you’re ready to apply your responses toward your preferred prewriting technique. 

1 Clustering prewriting

Clustering is an effective prewriting strategy that helps you make connections between different ideas in a visual format. This technique is also called idea mapping; it gets this name because of the weblike visual effect that clustering creates on the page.

Here’s how it works: 

• Write your primary idea in the middle of the page: Some writers circle or underline the idea. This might be your theme or thesis statement.
• Brainstorm secondary ideas: Other ideas related to your primary idea might come up in the brainstorming process. Write them around your central theme or idea, connecting the secondary ideas to your main idea.
• Repeat: Continue the above step for each secondary idea until all of your ideas are clustered in the idea map. 

2 Freewriting prewriting

The freewriting prewriting technique is a timed activity (you decide the duration) where you write your thoughts in full sentences. The goal is to maintain focused writing about the topic without stopping during the allowed time. This means no editing for grammatical errors or spelling mistakes and no stopping when you feel unsure about your ideas.

When the time is up, read through what you wrote and identify the most compelling ideas. Repeat the process, focusing on the standout idea that you pulled from the first exercise to formulate a succinct and narrow focus for your writing project or assignment.

Here’s a tip: You don’t have to guess whether you’re using certain words correctly or breaking grammar rules in your writing. Just copy and paste your writing to check your grammar and get instant feedback on grammar, spelling, punctuation, and other mistakes you might have missed.

3 Looping prewriting

If developing a writing topic is challenging, looping can be a helpful prewriting technique. It builds on the freewriting technique by asking you to loop a handful of freewriting activities back-to-back. After your first looping exercise, find the key topic or idea in that writing , and use it as a jumping-off point for your next looping exercise. 

By the end of five or so prewriting loops, you’ll have formed focused ideas that are closely related to a topic. These ideas can help you formulate a thesis statement or theme for your writing.

4 Listing prewriting

When you’re faced with a broad topic and don’t know how you want to focus your writing, creating a list may help. In a short time, typically five to ten minutes, write as many words and ideas as you can in a list format. Don’t worry about spelling or grammatical mistakes, and don’t overanalyze how you structure the idea. 

Examine your list and place ideas in groups based on their relationship. For example, group together ideas or words that share a common theme. Write a sentence describing each grouped relationship. By this point, you’ve taken a broad topic and narrowed it down to a focused theme or idea with related words and ideas listed underneath it. Choose the most important or intriguing sentence to guide you through your writing.

5 Question-asking prewriting

Also referred to as “journalist’s questions,” the question-asking technique leverages the five W s and one H that journalists strive to answer. On the page, you’ll answer the following question prompts, based on your central idea:

Examples of prewriting

Below are a couple of examples of how the various prewriting strategies look in action. These examples use the topic “passion and generational trauma in Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights .”

Freewriting example

Time limit: 2 minutes

Love and revenge are two dynamic emotions that carry their own judgment. Love is conventionally perceived as a positive, joyful emotion, while revenge is considered adversarial and attributed to negative behavior. But the core sentiment underlying love and revenge is unbridled passion . Heathcliff’s strategically executed passion, whether in reaction to his undying love for Catherine or his zealous hatred of Hindley, doesn’t stop at lashing out at the key figures in his life. It seeps into the lives of the next generation at Thrushcross Grange, including Hareton Earnshaw, Cathy Linton, and Linton Heathcliff. 

In this paragraph, we’ve identified the most compelling ideas to focus on in our writing assignment.

Question-asking example

• Who: Heathcliff, Catherine Earnshaw, Edgar Linton, Isabella Linton, Hindley Earnshaw
• What: Love and revenge are masqueraded as the other throughout the novel. The underlying sentiment that drives generational dissatisfaction and agony is passion.
• Where: Thrushcross Grange
• When: Hindley’s bullying and later attempted murder of Heathcliff as punishment for being Mr. Earnshaw’s favored child, love between Catherine and Heathcliff, Heathcliff seducing Isabella to spite Catherine’s marriage with Edgar.
• Why: Heathcliff’s passion, whether fueling love or revenge against figures in his life, results in generational trauma for Cathy Linton and Linton Heathcliff, who are forced to marry.
• How: Love is typically depicted as positive, while revenge is perceived negatively. Meanwhile, passion is more ambiguous yet is the most powerful driving force in Wuthering Heights and its characters.

Finding a prewriting strategy that complements your writing style is a matter of your own preference. If one prewriting technique doesn’t feel intuitive, try the next one on the list until you find an approach that works for you.

Prewriting FAQs 

What is prewriting.

Prewriting is a preliminary step in the writing process. It’s an approach to brainstorming ideas that allows writers to connect their main points and highlights areas that need additional analysis or supporting evidence. 

What is the purpose of prewriting?

Prewriting provides a clear writing path for ideas, from the beginning of an assignment to the end. It provides focus in writing by defining a purpose and letting writers clearly articulate their thoughts from one concept to the next. The result is a cohesive written work.

What are different ways to prewrite?

There are many different prewriting techniques. A few of the most popular types of prewriting include clustering, freewriting, listing, looping, and answering journalistic questions.

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Prewriting Strategies

Five useful strategies.

Pre-writing strategies use writing to generate and clarify ideas. While many writers have traditionally created outlines before beginning writing, there are several other effective prewriting activities. We often call these prewriting strategies “brainstorming techniques.” Five useful strategies are listing, clustering, freewriting, looping, and asking the six journalists' questions. These strategies help you with both your invention and organization of ideas, and they can aid you in developing topics for your writing.

Listing is a process of producing a lot of information within a short time by generating some broad ideas and then building on those associations for more detail with a bullet point list. Listing is particularly useful if your starting topic is very broad, and you need to narrow it down.

• Jot down all the possible terms that emerge from the general topic you are working on. This procedure works especially well if you work in a team. All team members can generate ideas, with one member acting as scribe. Do not worry about editing or throwing out what might not be a good idea. Simply write down as many possibilities as you can.
• Group the items that you have listed according to arrangements that make sense to you. Are things thematically related?
• Give each group a label. Now you have a narrower topic with possible points of development.
• Write a sentence about the label you have given the group of ideas. Now you have a topic sentence or possibly a  thesis statement .

Clustering, also called mind mapping or idea mapping, is a strategy that allows you to explore the relationships between ideas.

• Put the subject in the center of a page. Circle or underline it.
• As you think of other ideas, write them on the page surrounding the central idea. Link the new ideas to the central circle with lines.
• As you think of ideas that relate to the new ideas, add to those in the same way.

The result will look like a web on your page. Locate clusters of interest to you, and use the terms you attached to the key ideas as departure points for your paper.

Clustering is especially useful in determining the relationship between ideas. You will be able to distinguish how the ideas fit together, especially where there is an abundance of ideas. Clustering your ideas lets you see them visually in a different way, so that you can more readily understand possible directions your paper may take.

Freewriting

Freewriting is a process of generating a lot of information by writing non-stop in full sentences for a predetermined amount of time. It allows you to focus on a specific topic but forces you to write so quickly that you are unable to edit any of your ideas.

• Freewrite on the assignment or general topic for five to ten minutes non-stop. Force yourself to continue writing even if nothing specific comes to mind (so you could end up writing “I don’t know what to write about” over and over until an idea pops into your head. This is okay; the important thing is that you do not stop writing). This freewriting will include many ideas; at this point, generating ideas is what is important, not the grammar or the spelling.
• After you have finished freewriting, look back over what you have written and highlight the most prominent and interesting ideas; then you can begin all over again, with a tighter focus (see looping). You will narrow your topic and, in the process, you will generate several relevant points about the topic.

Looping is a freewriting technique that allows you to focus your ideas continually while trying to discover a writing topic. After you freewrite for the first time, identify a key thought or idea in your writing, and begin to freewrite again, with that idea as your starting point. You will loop one 5-10 minute freewriting after another, so you have a sequence of freewritings, each more specific than the last. The same rules that apply to freewriting apply to looping: write quickly, do not edit, and do not stop.

Loop your freewriting as many times as necessary, circling another interesting topic, idea, phrase, or sentence each time. When you have finished four or five rounds of looping, you will begin to have specific information that indicates what you are thinking about a particular topic. You may even have the basis for a tentative thesis or an improved idea for an approach to your assignment when you have finished.

The Journalists' Questions

Journalists traditionally ask six questions when they are writing assignments that are broken down into five W's and one H:  Who? ,  What? ,  Where? ,  When? ,  Why? , and  How?  You can use these questions to explore the topic you are writing about for an assignment. A key to using the journalists' questions is to make them flexible enough to account for the specific details of your topic. For instance, if your topic is the rise and fall of the Puget Sound tides and its effect on salmon spawning, you may have very little to say about  Who  if your focus does not account for human involvement. On the other hand, some topics may be heavy on the  Who , especially if human involvement is a crucial part of the topic.

The journalists' questions are a powerful way to develop a great deal of information about a topic very quickly. Learning to ask the appropriate questions about a topic takes practice, however. At times during writing an assignment, you may wish to go back and ask the journalists' questions again to clarify important points that may be getting lost in your planning and drafting.

Possible generic questions you can ask using the six journalists' questions follow:

• Who? Who are the participants? Who is affected? Who are the primary actors? Who are the secondary actors?
• What? What is the topic? What is the significance of the topic? What is the basic problem? What are the issues related to that problem?
• Where? Where does the activity take place? Where does the problem or issue have its source? At what place is the cause or effect of the problem most visible?
• When? When is the issue most apparent? (in the past? present? future?) When did the issue or problem develop? What historical forces helped shape the problem or issue and at what point in time will the problem or issue culminate in a crisis? When is action needed to address the issue or problem?
• Why? Why did the issue or problem arise? Why is it (your topic) an issue or problem at all? Why did the issue or problem develop in the way that it did?
• How? How is the issue or problem significant? How can it be addressed? How does it affect the participants? How can the issue or problem be resolved?

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• Writing Tips

5 Useful Prewriting Strategies

5-minute read

• 20th September 2021

Prewriting refers to the process of coming up with and organizing ideas for a piece of writing . But how should you approach prewriting? In this post, we explain five helpful strategies you can use to prepare for a writing project.

1. Brainstorming

Brainstorming might be the simplest prewriting technique around! It involves noting down every idea you have—good or bad—until you find one that inspires you.

The key here is to avoid being self-critical! All you need to do at this stage is jot down everything you think of related to your goals or the subject of your writing, no matter how basic or poorly articulated those ideas might seem at first.

Once you have a long list of words and phrases, you can start sorting through them, picking the most interesting or relevant ones to explore further. You can also try combining different ideas to come up with something new.

2. Freewriting

Freewriting , like brainstorming, encourages you to let ideas flow. But rather than just noting words and phrases, you’ll be writing in complete sentences and paragraphs.

This might involve starting with a single thought and pushing it as far as it will go during your freewriting session. Or it might involve coming up with lots of different ideas and jumping between them. The key, in either case, is to not stop writing.

Make a spelling mistake? Just leave it. Come up with an idea that immediately seems terrible? Just move on and keep writing. Come up with an idea that seems really promising? Excellent! But don’t stop! You can review anything you write once you’re done, but for now, you should focus on generating new ideas.

The best way to freewrite, then, is usually to set a time limit, then sit down and type for the whole time. Once your time is up, you can go back over what you’ve written, pick out the best ideas, and start planning how to write them up.

Looping is a version of freewriting that works as follows:

• Pick a topic and freewrite for a set time (e.g., 10 to 15 minutes).
• Review what you have written and write a summary sentence.
• Use the summary sentence as a prompt for another freewriting session.
• Repeat the loop until you feel happy with the ideas you’ve come up with.

The goal is to pinpoint and expand on your best idea during each loop. And once you’ve fully refined your basic concept, you can start the writing process proper.

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4. Concept Mapping

Concept mapping, also known as clustering, mind mapping, or idea mapping, is a strategy that allows you to visually explore the relationships between ideas.

To create a concept map , you can:

• Identify your main topic or an idea you want to explore.
• Write down your main topic or idea in a bubble at the center of a page.
• Think of words or ideas related to your main topic, then note these down in bubbles that branch off from your main concept (e.g., if your main concept were “proofreading,” you might have branches that connect to bubbles containing the words “clarity,” “concision,” “spelling,” “grammar,” and so on).
• Do the same with these secondary branches, looking for connected concepts and branching them off into smaller bubbles surrounding the main ones.

You can also draw lines connecting the secondary and tertiary bubbles. This will let you visualize the different ways in which your main topic could develop, or different connections between various concepts, helping you to plan your writing project.

5. Outlining

Finally, outlining is a prewriting strategy that is useful for organizing the ideas you’ve generated. This will help you plan the structure of your writing project.

To create an outline for a piece of writing, you can:

• Think about the overall point or argument you want to make, then break that down into a handful of key ideas that you will need to communicate.
• Make a bulleted or numbered list of these key points and arrange them in a logical order. For example, for an essay, you might start with an introduction that defines your topic, set out a series of points or pieces of evidence that support your argument, then end on a conclusion.
• For each main point, write a sentence summarizing what you will say.
• If necessary, break each main section down into a series of subsections or subpoints, each with a short summary sentence of their own.

Doing this will give you a clear structure to work with when you start writing. It is therefore especially helpful when planning longer writing projects, but it can be useful whenever you need to be sure a document has an easy-to-follow structure.

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As you can see, there are a variety of prewriting strategies available to you. Their effectiveness can vary depending on the type of writer that you are, so it’s important to try a few to find what works best for you!

We hope these tips help you feel more confident with beginning the writing process. And once you have something drafted, we have expert editors on hand 24/7 to help you with proofreading .

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Writing with artificial intelligence, prewriting – laying the foundation for successful writing.

Prewriting refers to all of the work you do before beginning to write. This article explores the dispositions and prewriting strategies writers employ to write more efficiently and with greater clarity and impact. Case studies, interviews, and observations of writers at work have found that prewriting involves balancing both intuitive, creative activities with critical, analytical strategies. For instance, during prewriting you are wise to listen your 'felt sense' - your embodied awareness of what you want to say. And, during prewriting, you are also wise to engage in more straightforward, cognitive processes such as engaging in outlining, drafting a document planner, or engaging in rhetorical analysis.

Table of Contents

What is Prewriting?

Prewriting refers to

• a ll of the work a writer engages in BEFORE BEGINNING TO WRITE
• the first stage of the writing process
• a liminal space — the space between thinking about working on a project and actually beginning to write.

Writers have many ways of engaging in prewriting , based on their individual preferences and the discourse conventions of their audience . Interviews and case studies of writers @ work have found that during prewriting writers engage in a variety of dispositions and strategies :

Dispositions

• During prewriting, writers embrace intellectual openness . They interview stakeholders, consider counterarguments , and review the peer-reviewed literature on the topic
• During prewriting, writers adopt a growth mindset . They privilege the believing game over the doubting game .
• Some writers believe the subconscious is a source of ideas, creativity and inspiration. Some believe dreams are a window into the subconscious.
• “When writers are given a topic , the topic itself evokes a felt sense in them. This topic calls forth images, words, ideas, and vague fuzzy feelings that are anchored in the writer’s body. What is elicited, then, is not solely the product of a mind but of a mind alive in a living, sensing body…..When writers pause, when they go back and repeat key words, what they seem to be doing is waiting, paying attention to what is still vague and unclear. They are looking to their felt experience, and waiting for an image, a word, a phrase to emerge that captures the sense they embody….Usually, when they make the decision to write, it is after they have a dawning awareness that something has clicked, that they have enough of a sense that if they begin with a few words heading in a certain direction, words will continue to come which will allow them to flesh out the sense they have” (Perl 1980, p. 365).
• Writers like to talk over an exigency , a problem , a call to write with trusted friends, peers, and mentors. In college, students like to brainstorm with one another to better understand a writing assignment or the needs of the audience, such as a manager or a client, before deciding to take it on as a writing project
• In interviews and memoirs, writers and artists report insatiable inquiry. They engage in informal research . They engage in strategic research in order to learn what is known about the topic creative play.
• Writers may engage in meditation to help slow down. They may need to turn off their phones and computers to reach the state of calmness and focus necessary to begin thinking about a writing project.
• Writers like to procrastinate. Sometimes writers need to set a call to write aside. They need to let an idea simmer on the back burner. They may sleep on it.
• Some creative people track and interpret their dreams. They say this helps them interpret their dreams for insights, reoccurring narratives, and solutions to problems they face during waking hours.
• Writers may engage in extensive strategic searching in order to identify the status “ conversation ” on a particular topic . Writers may freewrite to see where their thoughts lead them.

The terms planning , prewriting , and invention are sometimes used interchangeably, yet they each carry distinct meanings:

• Prewriting is a subset of planning, focusing more on the initial stages of idea generation, brainstorming, and exploration of thoughts before formal writing begins
• Planning typically refers to the overall process of organizing ideas and structuring a writing piece, encompassing the selection of topics, determination of purpose, and arrangement of content 
• Invention is often associated specifically with the creative aspect of prewriting , where writers devise innovative ideas, concepts, and arguments. 

Related Concepts: Document Planner ; Intellectual Openness ; Mindset ; Resilience ; Rhetorical Analysis ; Self-Regulation & Metacognition

Why Does Prewriting Matter?

• Prewriting helps clarify and refine the central theme or argument of the piece.
• During prewriting, writers have the freedom to explore different angles and perspectives . This creative exploration can lead to more original and engaging content.
• By outlining the main ideas during prewriting, writers can determine what additional research or information is needed, making their research efforts more focused and efficient.
• Engaging in prewriting activities like brainstorming or free writing can help overcome writer’s block by getting ideas flowing and reducing the pressure of creating perfect content from the start .
• Prewriting helps in structuring thoughts and ideas, leading to a more organized and coherent draft. This organization is crucial for the logical flow of the final piece.
• During prewriting, writers can consider their audience’s needs and expectations , tailoring the content to be more relevant and engaging for the intended readers.
• Prewriting sets a solid foundation for the first draft, ensuring that the writing process starts with a clear direction and purpose.
• With a clear outline or plan from the prewriting stage, the actual writing process becomes more efficient, as the writer has a clear roadmap to follow.
• Prewriting gives writers a chance to reflect on their topic, assess their knowledge and opinions , and evaluate the potential impact of their writing.

Is Prewriting Always Necessary?

No. Writers differ in how frequently or deeply they engage in prewriting. Some people prefer to jump immediately into composing . They don’t pause to reflect on the rhetorical situation . They don’t want to conduct a literature review. Instead, they want to immediately dive in and spark the creative process by freewriting , visual brainstorming , and other creative heuristics .

In contrast, other writers prefer to engage significant prewriting: they question

• What’s known about a topic ? what’s novel? what knowledge claims are currently being disputed?
• What does peer-reviewed literature say about the topic?
• Do I need to engage in empirical research? What methods are expected by the discourse community?
• What informal, background research needs to be done in order to prepare to write?
• What’s the best way to organize the document? What common organizational patterns should I use to help the readers interpret the message?

What Is the Difference Between Planning, Prewriting & Invention?

The terms planning , prewriting , and invention may be used used interchangeably because they are such intertwined processes, yet they each carry distinct meanings:

• Planning typically refers to the overall process of organizing ideas and structuring a writing piece , encompassing the selection of topics , determination of purpose , and arrangement of content.  It typically encompasses tools such as Team Charters and usage of project management software . While prewriting and invention may involve more creative and exploratory activities, planning is focused on setting a clear direction and framework for the writing.
• Prewriting is a subset of planning , focusing more on the initial stages of idea generation, brainstorming, and exploration of thoughts before formal writing begins. Prewriting is more expansive and free-form than planning, allowing for a broader exploration of thoughts and concepts. In comparison to invention, prewriting is less about generating new ideas and more about exploring and organizing existing ideas in preparation for writing.
• Invention in writing refers to the process of generating new ideas, concepts, or perspectives. Invention is distinct from planning and prewriting in that it is focused primarily on creating something new, rather than organizing or setting objectives for existing ideas.

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Prewriting 2: Generating Ideas

In general, it’s best to understand your task first and then start digging in to the assignment and your topic. Once you understand your writing task, you’ll be ready to start working on your ideas and your sources.

Keep in mind that the process and strategies described in this section are not intended to be overly sequential or rigid. Sometimes, you may find that you get new ideas for your paper as you read a source. There is nothing that says that you can’t work on developing those ideas while reading and annotating your sources. Other times, you may find that you have a new idea to add to your paper while you’re revising. Don’t let an overly rigid view of the process keep you from jumping to whatever stage is most productive for you.

Also, while you are prewriting especially, tell your inner critic to shut up and go take a nap. You need to be producing ideas, not shutting them down, even if some of them won’t work. If you censor yourself too much, you can talk yourself out of any possible topic and get stuck.

Starting When You Don’t Have a Topic…Yet

Sometimes the ideas for a paper come to us quickly. We know what we want to write about, or our problem may be too many ideas, rather than not enough. If that’s the case, you can skip this section (at least for this project), but you’ll want to pick up again when we get to narrowing your focus .

You may feel anxious if you don’t yet have a topic, and that anxiety may encourage you to latch onto the first topic that seems vaguely connected to the assignment, even if you don’t think it will work. Resist that urge. Finding a workable topic doesn’t take much time, and trying to work with a topic that isn’t viable or that you hate will ultimately cost you much more time.

So, first, take a breath. Ideas for topics are all around you. You just need to try some strategies to bring out the ones that can work for you.

If you are stuck for a topic, in 15 minutes or so, make quick notes on the following questions, without worrying about how these notes connect to the assignment (yet):

• Your major: What do you find interesting about your major (or a major you are considering)? What makes you want to pursue that field of study?
• Class topics: What intriguing topics have come up in this class or in other classes? What are you curious about?
• Popular topics: What ideas or issues are people talking about on social media, on the internet, or in popular magazines/newspapers that you would like to know more about?
• Your own knowledge: What are you already familiar with and know well? What do you spend your time on?
• Your passions: What do you care deeply about? What makes you angry or upset? What makes you excited or happy?
• Your experiences: What has happened to you that warrants further exploration?

It’s very important not to censor yourself as you write your notes. Don’t cross out a topic while you are generating ideas.

Now make a short list. Circle or highlight the topics that are the most likely to work for this assignment. If you have more than one, don’t worry. You’ll be able to try out the techniques in the next section on more than one topic, which should help you focus in on what you want to write about.

It’s also worth doing a quick internet search to get a sense of whether there is information available on your topic. While you won’t necessarily use those sources, this search can give you a sense of whether the topic has been hashed over thoroughly and whether it’s a recent topic. That search might also give you some additional ideas.

Narrowing or Focusing Your Topic

When writers choose their own topics, they frequently begin with broad topics: stem cell research, child abuse, or climate change, for example. These are all potentially fine topics, but they are far too broad to be covered effectively in most college-level writing assignments. While you can begin with a broad topic, you need to narrow your topic down (also called “focusing”) before you’ll be able to produce a successful essay or other project.

To narrow your topic, you need to find ways to look at your topic from specific angles or through specific lenses. Let’s take, for example, remote learning:

Don’t lock yourself into a narrowed topic too soon. Sometimes, you will figure out the best way to focus your topic along the way, particularly if you are required to use sources. If you start finding too much information, consider narrowing your topic even further. If you are not finding enough information, look for ways to broaden your topic in the research you have done thus far.

If you have a broad topic, try using the chart above. Try to find at least one narrowed version of your topic using each method.

Then, highlight, circle, or otherwise mark the topics that you think will work best, given the parameters of the assignment. Length will be important here, but so will sources.

For each topic you think is workable, try doing a quick internet search to see if there are relevant discussions and to see if you get any more ideas for narrowing.

If you aren’t sure whether a topic will work, see your professor!

Starting to Write

It’s never too early to start writing down your ideas. At this phase, you aren’t worried about how strong the ideas are or whether there is research to back them up—or even whether your ideas are good ones. Instead, you are just getting ideas down so that you can more easily examine them.

You are probably already familiar with at least some of the techniques I describe in this section.

• Brainstorming

Write out in a list all of the ideas you have while thinking about your topic. Use the assignment as a guide. If you are supposed to examine the pros and cons of an issue, try to keep your attention on whether something is positive or negative. If you are supposed to explain the reasons that people have for holding a particular position, try to keep your list focused on reasons. But don’t worry if you stray. You can always ignore that idea later.

By the way, brainstorming can also be used to choose a topic in the first place.

Mind mapping

• Freewriting

Set a timer for 5 or 10 minutes. Put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard and write. Don’t stop. If you really can’t think of anything, write “I can’t think of anything” until the time is up or you think of something.

Freewriting is like brainstorming, but in more detail. Just let the ideas flow, and definitely don’t worry about grammar and spelling and punctuation. If you write perfect sentences, great! If you write really messy sentences, great! The point is to get the ideas out. If you like the ideas you produce, you can always fix the sentences later.

Remember your inner editor—you know, the one that I told you to tell to shut up? On many word processors, that inner editor has a friend. Squiggles or underlines appear whenever the software thinks we’ve made an error. It’s easy to get distracted by these marks and to feel the need to fix your writing so that they go away.

While you can turn them off, there is a simpler way to shut the editor down: turn your monitor off. If you cannot turn your monitor off because you are working on a laptop, try opening your laptop flat on the table or putting a piece of paper over the screen. If you can’t see the text as it appears, you can’t see the lines either!

This can be disconcerting at first, and you will probably still try to correct your mistakes. But eventually, you’ll settle in and focus on what you want to say, which is the point.

If freewriting works for you, consider adjusting it to meet your needs. For example, if you might find that 5-10 minutes isn’t enough time, try writing for longer periods.

Or try using it in specific situations. For example, I use this technique when I find myself getting stuck trying to write clear explanations. I flip to a new screen and write like I’m explaining the idea to my sisters, who aren’t familiar with my topic. Once I find the flow of the explanation again, I copy the part that works into my draft, and I’m back on track!

Using Sources for Ideas

In the fourth section, I talk in more detail about locating and using sources , but for the purposes of prewriting, I want you to think about how you can use sources to generate ideas.

As you read the sources that you are planning to use for your project, use note-taking and reflection strategies in particular, to make sure you are keeping track of things like the following:

• Passages that might be useful in your project
• Ideas for your paper that you get while reading
• Responses to the ideas that you are reading
• Connections between ideas in different sources
• Contradictions between ideas in different sources

Don’t just mark passages in a reading that you might use. Take notes on how what you think about those passages and how you might use them. You also might find it helpful to copy these passages and notes into a document where you can start drafting.

• It’s better to understand the assignment, including your purpose and audience, before you start generating ideas.
• If you don’t have a topic, explore ideas from other classes, areas you are interested in, your experiences, and issues that you care about for possible topics.
• If you have a topic but need to narrow it down, try taking a specific angle on your topic. There’s a list of ways to focus your topic in the table in this chapter.
• Mindmapping
• Taking notes as you read your sources

Text Attribution

This chapter was revised with the help of students in my class during Fall 2022 (who wished to remain nameless). I am particularly grateful for the idea to include the “Key Points” section here, which I have added most chapters.

Media Attributions

“Brainstorming Icon” by Jan Helebrant is in the Public Domain .

“Memorize Mind Map” by Fernandosca is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 . The original work was edited slightly for inclusion in this chapter.

Forming or following in a logical order or sequence.

A technique for generating ideas that involves listing as many as you can think of quickly.

Reading and Writing Successfully in College: A Guide for Students Copyright © 2023 by Patricia Lynne is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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The Prewriting Stage of the Writing Process

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The writing process consists of different stages: prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing. Prewriting is the most important of these steps. Prewriting is the "generating ideas" part of the writing process when the student works to determine the topic and the position or point-of-view for a target audience. Pre-writing should be offered with the time necessary for a student to create a plan or develop an outline to organize materials for the final product.

Why Prewrite?

The pre-writing stage could also be dubbed the "talking stage" of writing. Researchers have determined that talking plays an important role in literacy. Andrew Wilkinson (1965) coined the phrase oracy, defining it as "the ability to express oneself coherently and to communicate freely with others by word of mouth." Wilkinson explained how oracy leads to increased skill in reading and writing. In other words, talking about a topic will improve the writing. This connection between talk and writing is best expressed by the author James Britton (1970) who stated: "talk is the sea upon which all else floats.”

Prewriting Methods

There are a number of ways that students can tackle the prewriting stage of the writing process. Following are a few of the most common methods and strategies that students can use. 

• Brainstorming - Brainstorming is the process of coming up with as many ideas as possible about a topic without being worried about the feasibility or whether an idea is realistic or not. A list format is often the easiest to organize. This can be done individually and then shared with the class or done as a group. Access to this list during the writing process can help students make connections they may want to use later in their writing.
• Freewriting - The free write strategy is when your students write whatever comes into their mind about the topic at hand for a specific amount of time, like 10 or 15 minutes. In a free write, students should not worry about grammar, punctuation, or spelling. Instead, they should try and come up with as many ideas as they possibly can to help them when they get to the writing process. 
• Mind Maps - Concept maps or mind-mapping are great strategies to use during the pre-writing stage. Both are visual ways to outline information. There are many varieties of mind maps that can be quite useful as students work in the prewriting stage. Webbing is a great tool that has students write a word in the middle of a sheet of paper. Related words or phrases are then connected by lines to this original word in the center. They build on the idea so that, in the end, the student has a wealth of ideas that are connected to this central idea. For example, if the topic for a paper were the role of the US President , the student would write this in the center of the paper. Then as they thought of each role that the president fulfills, they could write this down in a circle connected by a line to this original idea. From these terms, the student could then add supporting details. In the end, they would have a nice roadmap for an essay on this topic. 
• Drawing/Doodling - Some students respond well to the idea of being able to combine words with drawings as they think about what they want to write in the prewriting stage. This can open up creative lines of thought. 
• Asking Questions - Students often come up with more creative ideas through the use of questioning. For example, if the student has to write about Heathcliff's role in Wuthering Heights , they might begin by asking themselves some questions about him and the causes of his hatred. They might ask how a 'normal' person might react to better understand the depths of Heathcliff's malevolence. The point is that these questions can help the student uncover a deeper understanding of the topic before they begin writing the essay.
• Outlining - Students can employ traditional outlines to help them organize their thoughts in a logical manner. The student would start with the overall topic and then list out their ideas with supporting details. It is helpful to point out to students that the more detailed their outline is from the beginning, the easier it will be for them write their paper. 

Teachers should recognize that prewriting that begins in a "sea of talk" will engage students. Many students will find that combining a couple of these strategies may work well to provide them with a great basis for their final product. They may find that if they ask questions as they brainstorm, free write, mind-map, or doodle, they will organize their ideas for the topic. In short, the time put in up front in the pre-writing stage will make the writing stage much easier.

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Prewriting: What It Is and How to Do It

by Yen Cabag

When we read other people’s books, it’s easy to marvel at how everything seems to tie in together. We imagine that the author is just a skillful writer who can expertly present ideas in a well-organized fashion, and we wish we could do the same. 

The good news is that anyone can use prewriting techniques to strengthen the content of the final output, whether you write fiction or nonfiction. In this post, we’ll show you how to make the most of your prewriting activities so you can plan a more organized essay or story.

6 Most Helpful Prewriting Activities 

Prewriting refers to all the steps involved before you write what will become the final contents of your book. Typically, it includes the following activities: 

1. Brainstorm

During brainstorming, you start to list down all the topics you would like to write about. When we say list down, we mean just to write them all down without qualifying them. Set a timer for about five to ten minutes, and write down all your ideas. After you do this, go over your list and pick one topic. 

Then, think of all the ideas that come to mind related to the topic you chose. Again, you can choose to set a timer for only about five to ten minutes. The key is to give yourself a time limit and invite a barrage of ideas. From your new list, circle those that you want to focus on for your essay or report. 

Here’s an example of brainstorming a list of essay topics for an ecology class:

• natural environment
• benefits for children
• benefits for mental health
• natural habitat
• protecting natural habitat
• endemic flora and fauna
• climate change
• human intervention
• human damage 
• homesteading

2. Make a mind map

Another prewriting activity you can do is called clustering or mind mapping . You start with the topic you already chose during your brainstorming session. But in clustering or mind mapping, you list down ideas as they relate to each other. 

How do you do this? First, you write your main idea inside a circle in the middle of your page. Then, as you think of an idea that relates to that first main idea, you draw a line and write that idea inside another circle. You add more ideas by adding lines and circles, and each “sub-idea” can be a major category or heading in your paper or essay. 

Here is an example of mind-mapping or clustering ideas around a main theme, the pros and cons of smart phones:

3. Freewrite

Freewriting and looping are similar to brainstorming and mind mapping, with one exception: freewriting involves writing nonstop, perhaps conversationally, kind of like writing in a diary or journal, about just about anything you can think of.

Looping is also similar in that you write nonstop, except that it’s around a given topic. For both of these prewriting activities, you shouldn’t edit as you go. Instead, devote about ten minutes just to spout off everything you can think of! The goal is to find ideas that we can then develop into a formal, organized piece. 

With that said, freewriting and looping are great tools for those who love writing or processing things in writing, such as those who already journal or keep a diary. But for others who struggle to form complete sentences, brainstorming and mind mapping may be easier options, especially with the self-imposed time limit. 

4. Ask a journalist’s questions

Every journalist needs answers to the 5 Ws and 1 H we all learned as kids: What , Who , When , Where , Why , and How . Using these questions can help you zone in on the important things about your chosen topic, and ensure that you include all the needed information. 

Of course, when using this system for prewriting, you don’t have to stop at these six questions. Instead, use them as starting points.

Start by answering each question for your main topic. (You may not have answers to all of the questions, and that’s OK.) Answer them in detail, and as you write down your answers, note any additional questions that come to mind. Keep answering the questions and writing down more follow-up questions as they come up. 

This prewriting activity is especially helpful for research-heavy writing, because it helps you think up more areas that you can dig into. 

5. Create an outline

Some novel-writers are plotters, and can only start writing once an outline is in place; others are pantsers , which means they write by the seat of their pants. Stephen King is one of the best examples of a pantser; in fact, when fans demand, “Why did you kill this or that character?” he likes to quip, “I didn’t kill him, I found him dead!” 

And while we all love the twists and turns in King’s novels, they are not easy to emulate. Most writers, no matter how talented, will require some tweaking to put things in a logical order. 

This also applies to nonfiction books and academic writing: a list of chapter titles or themes, at the bare minimum, can help you arrange your ideas in a logical sequence. 

Take a look at this first-draft outline for a thesis on parenting, with summary notes of what the writer wants to include: 

• Thesis Statement: Couples who prioritize their marriage become better parents .
• Body Paragraph 1: A child’s psychological growth is dependent on their sense of security .
• Body Paragraph 2: Parents’ relational skills are affected by their relationship with their spouse .
• Body Paragraph #3: Effects of divorce on children’s growth and development
• Concluding Paragraph

6. Keep a journal 

Journaling is not a prewriting activity that’s directly related to a topic you will be writing on. Rather, it’s considered a helpful prewriting activity for generating a supply of ideas for future use. 

You can journal the things you’ve learned, or those you are curious about, or just about anything you’ve realized from your courses.

Include you own observations, opinions, or what areas you agree or disagree with. The practice of writing down your thoughts and analyzing things on paper will go a long way in helping you write well on other topics that may come up in the future. 

What Is the Purpose of Prewriting? 

Even though prewriting may seem like an unnecessary step if you already know what you want to write, you shouldn’t dismiss its importance! This part of the writing process serves several important purposes: 

It helps you recognize more ideas. 

When you do prewriting actvities, such as brainstorming or mind-mapping, it helps you list down everything you can think of about a certain topic. This helps ensure that you don’t overlook important aspects of the idea you’ve chosen. 

It prevents bias by giving you a well-rounded perspective. 

This is especially true for nonfiction. If you just go ahead and start writing, chances are, it will be rife with your personal opinions and not as well-rounded as it should be. 

When you prewrite, it helps you think through the topic from all perspectives, making it a more objectively-written piece that can benefit anyone who reads it. 

Prewriting helps you arrange your thoughts in a logical flow.

Readers don’t buy a book to read a huge jumble of ideas that somebody just rambled off; they buy a book that has been logically arranged and from which they can learn things. 

Similarly, when writing an academic paper, you don’t just compile all the things you’ve researched in a heap. Instead, you need to give them some form of coherence and order, and prewriting, particularly creating an outline, helps you do this. 

Prewriting Helps You Write Better 

The process of prewriting is well worth the time invested. In fact, it will save you time later through fewer revisions, since your ideas will be well organized and thoroughly developed.

Remember, nobody is born a great writer, but with practice and dedication, you can improve your skills and get your ideas across in clearer and more concise ways. 

Did you find this post helpful? Let us know in the comments below!

If you enjoyed this post, then you might also like:

• How to Write a Rhetorical Analysis: 6 Steps and an Outline for Your Next Essay
• How to Write a Reflection Paper in 5 Steps (plus Template and Sample Essay)
• How to Write a Literary Analysis: 6 Tips for the Perfect Essay
• How to Write an Expository Essay: Types, Tips, and Topics

Yen Cabag is the Blog Writer of TCK Publishing. She is also a homeschooling mom, family coach, and speaker for the Charlotte Mason method, an educational philosophy that places great emphasis on classic literature and the masterpieces in art and music. She has also written several books, both fiction and nonfiction. Her passion is to see the next generation of children become lovers of reading and learning in the midst of short attention spans.

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Introduction to Prewriting (Invention)

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When you sit down to write...

• Does your mind turn blank?
• Are you sure you have nothing to say?

If so, you're not alone. Many writers experience this at some time or another, but some people have strategies or techniques to get them started. When you are planning to write something, try some of the following suggestions.

You can try the textbook formula:

• State your thesis.
• Write an outline.
• Write the first draft.
• Revise and polish.

. . . but that often doesn't work.

Instead, you can try one or more of these strategies:

Ask yourself what your purpose is for writing about the subject.

There are many "correct" things to write about for any subject, but you need to narrow down your choices. For example, your topic might be "dorm food." At this point, you and your potential reader are asking the same question, "So what?" Why should you write about this, and why should anyone read it?

Do you want the reader to pity you because of the intolerable food you have to eat there?

Do you want to analyze large-scale institutional cooking?

Do you want to compare Purdue's dorm food to that served at Indiana University?

Ask yourself how you are going to achieve this purpose.

How, for example, would you achieve your purpose if you wanted to describe some movie as the best you've ever seen? Would you define for yourself a specific means of doing so? Would your comments on the movie go beyond merely telling the reader that you really liked it?

Start the ideas flowing

Brainstorm. Gather as many good and bad ideas, suggestions, examples, sentences, false starts, etc. as you can. Perhaps some friends can join in. Jot down everything that comes to mind, including material you are sure you will throw out. Be ready to keep adding to the list at odd moments as ideas continue to come to mind.

Talk to your audience, or pretend that you are being interviewed by someone — or by several people, if possible (to give yourself the opportunity of considering a subject from several different points of view). What questions would the other person ask? You might also try to teach the subject to a group or class.

See if you can find a fresh analogy that opens up a new set of ideas. Build your analogy by using the word like. For example, if you are writing about violence on television, is that violence like clowns fighting in a carnival act (that is, we know that no one is really getting hurt)?

Take a rest and let it all percolate.

Summarize your whole idea.

Tell it to someone in three or four sentences.

Diagram your major points somehow.

Make a tree, outline, or whatever helps you to see a schematic representation of what you have. You may discover the need for more material in some places. Write a first draft.

Then, if possible, put it away. Later, read it aloud or to yourself as if you were someone else. Watch especially for the need to clarify or add more information.

You may find yourself jumping back and forth among these various strategies.

You may find that one works better than another. You may find yourself trying several strategies at once. If so, then you are probably doing something right.

GKT103: General Knowledge for Teachers – Essays

Pre-Writing

Sitting down for an exam and reading an essay prompt can be intimidating. One way to ease your nerves and help you focus on the task is to pre-write. Pre-writing is a way to think through the essay question, gather your thoughts, and keep yourself from becoming overwhelmed. This resource explains pre-writing and shows strategies you can practice now and use on exam day to help ensure that you start your essay writing off on the right foot!

Planning the Structure of an Essay

Planning based on audience and purpose.

Identifying the target audience and purpose of an essay is a critical part of planning the structure and techniques that are best to use. It's important to consider the following:

• Is the the purpose of the essay to educate, announce, entertain, or persuade?
• Who might be interested in the topic of the essay?
• Who would be impacted by the essay or the information within it?
• What does the reader know about this topic?
• What does the reader need to know in order to understand the essay's points?
• What kind of hook is necessary to engage the readers and their interest?
• What level of language is required? Words that are too subject-specific may make the writing difficult to grasp for readers unfamiliar with the topic.
• What is an appropriate tone for the topic? A humorous tone that is suitable for an autobiographical, narrative essay may not work for a more serious, persuasive essay.

Hint: Answers to these questions help the writer to make clear decisions about diction (i.e., the choice of words and phrases), form and organization, and the content of the essay.

Use Audience and Purpose to Plan Language

In many classrooms, students may encounter the concept of language in terms of correct versus incorrect. However, this text approaches language from the perspective of appropriateness. Writers should consider that there are different types of communities, each of which may have different perspectives about what is "appropriate language" and each of which may follow different rules, as John Swales discussed in "The Concept of Discourse Community". Essentially, Swales defines discourse communities as "groups that have goals or purposes, and use communication to achieve these goals".

Writers (and readers) may be more familiar with a home community that uses a different language than the language valued by the academic community. For example, many people in Hawai‘i speak Hawai‘i Creole English (HCE colloquially regarded as "Pidgin"), which is different from academic English. This does not mean that one language is better than another or that one community is homogeneous in terms of language use; most people "code-switch" from one "code" (i.e., language or way of speaking) to another. It helps writers to be aware and to use an intersectional lens to understand that while a community may value certain language practices, there are several types of language practices within our community.

What language practices does the academic discourse community value? The goal of first-year-writing courses is to prepare students to write according to the conventions of academia and Standard American English (SAE). Understanding and adhering to the rules of a different discourse community does not mean that students need to replace or drop their own discourse. They may add to their language repertoire as education continues to transform their experiences with language, both spoken and written. In addition to the linguistic abilities they already possess, they should enhance their academic writing skills for personal growth in order to meet the demands of the working world and to enrich the various communities they belong to.

Use Techniques to Plan Structure

Before writing a first draft, writers find it helpful to begin organizing their ideas into chunks so that they (and readers) can efficiently follow the points as organized in an essay.

First, it's important to decide whether to organize an essay (or even just a paragraph) according to one of the following:

• Chronological order (organized by time)
• Spatial order (organized by physical space from one end to the other)
• Prioritized order (organized by order of importance)

There are many ways to plan an essay's overall structure, including mapping and outlining.

Mapping (which sometimes includes using a graphic organizer) involves organizing the relationships between the topic and other ideas. The following is example (from ReadWriteThink.org, 2013) of a graphic organizer that could be used to write a basic, persuasive essay:

Outlining is also an excellent way to plan how to organize an essay. Formal outlines use levels of notes, with Roman numerals for the top level, followed by capital letters, Arabic numerals, and lowercase letters. Here's an example:

• Hook/Lead/Opener: According to the Leilani was shocked when a letter from Chicago said her "Aloha Poke" restaurant was infringing on a non-Hawaiian Midwest restaurant that had trademarked the words "aloha" (the Hawaiian word for love, compassion, mercy, and other things besides serving as a greeting) and "poke" (a Hawaiian dish of raw fish and seasonings).
• Background information about trademarks, the idea of language as property, the idea of cultural identity, and the question about who owns language and whether it can be owned.
• Thesis Statement (with the main point and previewing key or supporting points that become the topic sentences of the body paragraphs): While some business people use language and trademarks to turn a profit, the nation should consider that language cannot be owned by any one group or individual and that former (or current) imperialist and colonialist nations must consider the impact of their actions on culture and people groups, and legislators should bar the trademarking of non-English words for the good of internal peace of the country.
• Legislators should bar the trademarking of non-English words for the good and internal peace of the country.
• Conclusion (Revisit the Hook/Lead/Opener, Restate the Thesis, End with a Twist - a strong more globalized statement about why this topic was important to write about)

Note about outlines: Informal outlines can be created using lists with or without bullets. What is important is that main and subpoint ideas are linked and identified.

Just Add Students

Tools to Help You Teach Middle School ELA

11 Pre writing Strategies (and how to use them)

There are many prewriting strategies you can use to help your students get ready to write. Here is a list of 11 and how to use them.

Teaching writing can be a daunting task, but by breaking the writing process up, you’re students will be more successful.

The best place to start writing instruction is with prewriting – and lots of it! I’ve collected a list of prewriting activities — defined and with examples — to help you get started.

What is prewriting?

Let’s start with a quick definition of prewriting:

Prewriting is part of the writing process in which the writer gathers ideas, explores the writing prompt, generates thoughts, and organizes them.

It is an opportunity for writers to expand their ideas about a prompt and think creatively and critically about what they want to say.

Why is it important to the writing process?

We often short-change prewriting activities, but they are so valuable!

Prewriting allows students to explore, test, and generate ideas. They provide students with ways to organize and expand on their writing.

Have you noticed this?

Students often pick their first idea and run with it.

And it’s often very difficult to get them to even look at other ideas. They are set with that first one! But often our first idea isn’t the best — we want our students to think critically and creatively.

Incorporate more prewriting strategies as you plan your writing tasks .

Ask your students to complete at least two (or more!) different prewriting activities before they begin drafting.

I want my students to start drafting when they are ready to go…with the ideas and the organization ready to burst out! I tell them that I want the paper to write itself. That can happen when they’ve done prewriting.

We want writing to be an act of discovery, and prewriting can help students get there. By trying out several activities, they can discover what they want to write about.

How to use prewriting strategies effectively

Always model what you want students to do.

Whether they are working on expository writing or a creative writing prompt , prewriting is going to make the writing process so much easier.

For example, if students are writing narratives , start your own narrative right along with them. Show them how you would brainstorm or cluster.

Additionally, show students how you can “throw away” an idea. This will often lead them to a deeper, more creative approach to the topic. I always say, “throw away your first two ideas.”

Help them find discovery in their prewriting.

Writing is a form of discovery. We uncover how we feel, what we remember, what is important to us when we write.

As you model your own prewriting graphic organizer, share what you discover. It certainly doesn’t have to be monumental or personal.

Do more than you think is necessary.

Your students may all have ideas for what they want to write about as soon as you provide the prompt. However, don’t skip the prewriting! It will help your students organize their thoughts, come up with details, and fill in gaps.

Use prewriting activities as an opportunity to conference .

Go over prewriting activities (no matter how messy) to confer with your students. You will be quickly be able to see how ready they are to begin drafting, if they have a viable topic, and if the topic is too big (as is often the case).

What are some of the best prewriting strategies?

Brainstorming.

What it is: Brainstorming is probably the most familiar prewriting activity. It is simply a “brain dump” of ideas about a topic.

How to use it: The writer simply writes down all the ideas that pop into her head as she considers the topic. Don’t try to self-edit or speculate on the idea, just get it down.

After brainstorming, the writer will see ideas that “want” to group together. He may find himself gravitating to one idea over the others. Pay attention to these things.

Students may want to complete a clustering prewriting activity after brainstorming.

What it is: Clustering is gathering ideas and thoughts into categories.

How to use it: Look at the prompt and determine some big categories that might fall under the topic.

Students can write the ideas in circles (like a cluster). It’s helpful to label the clusters or color code them.

Use this technique after students have done some brainstorming or freewriting. This will allow them to create categories and pull ideas more easily.

Then what: After clustering students may be ready to start organizing ideas. A simple outline is ideal for this.

Free writing

What it is: Free writing (sometimes spelled as one word) is simply writing about an idea for a specific period of time. It can be a stream of consciousness or in response to a prompt.

How to use it: Use freewriting as a way for students to dive in and explore a prompt or topic.

Set the time (start with maybe 5 – 7 minutes) and have your students write continuously. They shouldn’t worry about spelling, grammar, organization — they are just getting their thoughts down on paper.

After freewriting, students might want to complete a looping activity.

What it is: Looping is the perfect prewriting strategy to use after students have done freewriting. When using this technique, they’ll chose an idea from their freewriting to explore on a deeper level.

How to use it: Go back to the freewriting and choose a word, sentence, or phrase that interests them or that they think might make a good topic. Write that word, sentence, or phrase at the top of a new page, set the timer, and have students write about that topic until the timer goes off.

Then what? After looping, students may want to try clustering or even outlining.

What it is: Listing is just a simple list of ideas. This is a great prewriting activity for students who really don’t know what to write about.

How to use it: I think it’s easiest to put the topic or key word from the prompt at the top of the page. That makes it easy to stay focused on the prompt.

Allow students to create as many different lists as they like.

For example , if you prompt is to write about a time when you learned something, students may create lists that are titled, “school,” “family,” “sports.” This will help them narrow their topic.

Then what? Once students have a list, they have choices! The natural next step is for students to choose an item from the list that they feel some energy or excitement about. Use it for freewriting, brainstorming, or even clustering.

Mapping & Diagramming

What it is: Mapping (or diagramming) is a great visual organizational prewriting activity that helps students see relationships. Writers create a concept map of how different elements fit together.

How to use it: In its simplest form, this prewriting technique entails using shapes, symbols, colors, arrows, and lines. Start with the main idea in the center, and look for ideas that connect or are important.

By the end of a mapping prewriting activity, students should have a “bird’s eye” view of what their topic entails. This is really helpful in determining if the topic is too big.

Then what? After mapping, the next logical question is — “Is my topic too big?”

Use your writing conferences to determine if their topic is too big. This is helpful in preventing students from getting overwhelmed with drafting.

What it is: We’re all familiar with a standard outline form — a prewriting outline is an abbreviated form of that.

How to use it: Outlining is a great tool once students have completed some other preliminary prewriting. If they have done clustering or listing, they have items they need to categorize.

When you ask your students to outline for a writing project, remember that the outline itself isn’t the goal. You want your students to move from the prewriting activity to drafting, so don’t make the outline a complicated lesson. Keep it simple.

Then what? Once students have completed an outline, they should be ready to write a draft. An outline will guide them through their essay.

5 Ws and 1 H

What it is: The 5 Ws and 1 H are what journalist use — it’s the who, what, where, when, why, and how of a topic.

How to use it: Have students address each question. If they find they can’t answer a question, this may be a spot where they need to fill in with research.

Encourage students to ask more than just one question for each word.

For example, a student writing an expository essay on choosing a pet, she might ask: “Why is a pet important?” “Why should you research different types of pets?” “Why are pets beneficial to humans?”

Then what? This is another prewriting strategy that is very helpful in determining if students have narrow enough topic. A student could write an entire paper on just the question “Why are pets beneficial to humans?”

As students see the questions they are generating about their topic, they will often find that there are several topics they’d like to write about. This is wonderful! Students will see that they have a topic ready for their next assignment.

What it is: Using journaling as a prewriting activity is similar to freewriting. Students write about the topic. It is different from freewriting where the focus is to keep writing. Responding to a prompt in a journal is more intentional.

How to use it: Allow students to respond to a prompt in their journals or writing notebook. They may want to jump right into an idea they have about the prompt and begin developing their ideas.

Many teachers like to use morning warm ups that include writing prompts. Students can go back to these prompts and expand them for a larger writing activity.

Using a journal to respond to a writing prompt can also help students dig into their feelings and opinions about a topic.

Using a journal also helps with “writing as discovery.” As students write in their journals, they often discover what it is that they want to say, how they feel, and why something is important (or not) to them.

Then what? Like other prewriting activities, a journal response to a prompt isn’t going to be a first draft. Students can go back into their response and pull ideas, images, and thoughts that they want to include in a draft.

Students often write their thesis statement in the conclusion of a journal entry! So be sure that students write a concluding paragraph.

Pros & cons list

What it is: Students create a list of arguments in favor and opposition to a prompt.

How to use it: This prewriting strategy works well with arguments and persuasive writing activities. Even though students may be arguing one point or another, having a list of pros and cons can help them see where they need to strengthen their argument and where they can attack their opposition.

Have students make an actual list with two columns. One column in favor and one column opposed.

It can also be helpful for students to work in pairs with one person arguing one side and bring up all the opposing ideas.

Then what? After completing a pro/con list, students might be ready to work on their thesis statement. Where do they stand on this topic?

Once they’ve determined that, you may want them to create a brief outline that will guide their writing, or you may want them to complete a Venn diagram to dig deeper into the issues.

Venn diagram

What it is: A Venn diagram is two intersecting circles that illustrate how two things are different and alike. (want to know why a Venn diagram is always capitalized? Here’s your answer !!)

How to use it: There is nothing like a Venn diagram to compare and contrast. And it is so simple to use.

Students can draw the diagram right into their resource book and fill it in.

Like the pro/con list, a Venn diagram makes an argument clear to students. Unlike a pro/con list, the diagram helps students see commonalities. Another important aspect when writing an argument or persuasive essay.

Then what? After students have completed a Venn diagram, they might be ready to put together an outline. This will help them determine what they will write about and in what order.

They will also be ready to begin addressing and refuting their opposition.

Heart mapping

What it is: A heart map is a visual classification of something that holds a place in your heart.

How to use it: Begin by having students draw a heart. Be sure to provide a title or prompt for their heart map. This It could be something like:

• things that I feel strongly about
• important events
• best / worst
• what I value
• let me convince you…

Have students divide the heart into sections and write one idea in each section. They can include a sentence further explaining each idea.

If you want to take this a step further, require that students include adjectives, prepositional phrases, or descriptive phrases.

Then what: Once students have completed a heart map, they can choose one of the ideas from their map to use as a spring board for writing.

Additionally, students can create a heart map each month, at the start of a new quarter, as a more focused prewriting activity — it’s not a one-and-done activity.

As an added bonus, a heart map can be used multiple times for writing narratives, arguments, persuasive texts, poems…and more.

Ready to draft

Once your students have completed one or (hopefully) more of these prewriting strategies, they will probably feel ready to draft their essay.

When students feel like their essay will “write itself” you know you’ve provided them with solid prewriting activities that will make the final writing product more effective and easier for students to write.

You can find all 11 prewriting activities in this digital resource .

Or, if you’re looking for a little extra help with the rest of the writing process, check out my shop !

With gratitude for all you do,

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An Overview of Academic Writing, Planning, and Prewriting

It can be tempting to dive into an essay immediately without taking the time to really think through what you are writing about and why you might be doing so. This can lead to essays that lack coherence and veer off topic, and not having an organized prewriting process can also create quite a bit of stress for the writer. The quality of writing without prewriting is often inconsistent, as the writer becomes trapped in simply writing and hoping that their initial instincts have set them on the correct course. As you move into your professional life, you will need to adopt a writing process that is consistent, creates effective papers, and, perhaps most importantly, minimizes the stress and anxiety that can come along with any writing endeavor.

Prewriting activities might be intimidating, especially if you have never spent much time on them in the past. However, an effective prewriting process, while perhaps requiring some additional time at the outset, will save you quite a bit of time and stress in the long run. The ideas covered in this chapter will help you map out your paper and consider how your intended audience might affect its structure, tone, and content. In doing so, it will help you escape the “writing and hoping” trap.

We Will Begin Our Journey By Exploring Basic Prewriting Concepts

Read through the following content on effective prewriting strategies, which has been adapted from Ann Inoshita, et al’ s English Composition: Connect, Collaborate, Communicate. As you do so, try employing some of the strategies to plan out your papers for this course and beyond!

Prewriting is an essential activity for most writers. Through robust prewriting, writers generate ideas, explore directions, and find their way into their writing. When students attempt to write an essay without developing their ideas, strategizing their desired structure, and focusing on precision with words and phrases, they can end up with a “premature draft”—one that is more writer-based than reader-based and, thus, might not be received by readers in the way the writer intended.

In addition, a lack of prewriting can cause students to experience writer’s block. Writer’s block is the feeling of being stuck when faced with a writing task. It is often caused by fear, anxiety, or a tendency toward perfectionism, but it can be overcome through prewriting activities that allow writers to relax, catch their breath, gather ideas, and gain momentum.

The following exist as the goals of prewriting:

• Contemplating the many possible ideas worth writing about.
• Developing ideas through brainstorming, freewriting, and focused writing.
• Planning the structure of the essay overall so as to have a solid introduction, meaningful body paragraphs, and a purposeful conclusion.

Discovering and Developing Ideas

Quick prewriting activities.

Quick strategies for developing ideas include brainstorming, freewriting, and focused freewriting. These activities are done quickly, with a sense of freedom, while writers silence their inner critic. In her book Wild Mind , teacher and writer Natalie Goldberg describes this freedom as the “creator hand” freely allowing thoughts to flow onto the page while the “editor hand” remains silent.

Sometimes, these techniques are done in a timed situation (usually two to ten minutes), which allows writers to get through the shallow thoughts and dive deeper to access the depths of the mind. The logic behind timed freewriting is that it forces writers to focus more than they would in an untimed situation. The process can be more stressful, but if this strategy works for you, consider using timed exercises to map out and work on sections of your projects beyond your composition course. Timed writing can provide windows of focus in otherwise unstructured spaces.

Brainstorming begins with writing down or typing a few words and then filling the page with words and ideas that are related or that seem important without allowing the inner critic to tell the writer if these ideas are acceptable or not. Writers do this quickly and without too much contemplation. Students will know when they are succeeding because the lists are made without stopping.

Freewriting is the “most effective way” to improve one’s writing, according to Peter Elbow, the educator and writer who first coined the term “freewriting” in his pivotal book Writing Without Teachers , published in 1973. Freewriting is a great technique for loosening up the writing muscle. To freewrite, writers must silence the inner critic and the “editor hand” and allow the “creator hand” a specified amount of time (usually from 10 to 20 minutes) to write nonstop about whatever comes to mind. The goal is to keep the hand moving, the mind contemplating, and the individual writing. If writers feel stuck, they just keep writing “I don’t know what to write” until new ideas form and develop in the mind and flow onto the page.

Focused freewriting entails writing freely—and without stopping, during a limited time—about a specific topic. Once writers are relaxed and exploring freely, they may be surprised about the ideas that emerge.

Operation Beat Writer’s Block: Brainstorming

Let’s start with a basic brainstorming activity.

• Watch the following video from Wisconsin Technical College System (WTCS) and think about what makes brainstorming an essential prewriting activity. What are some of the potential costs of not brainstorming?
• Don’t have a topic yet or need to think through things more before you attempt the mind map? Try the brainstorming exercise embedded in the video itself (at the 1:50 mark).

Next Step: Create a Mind Map to Visualize Your Essay

Mind mapping is an early-stage prewriting strategy that you can use to help generate ideas for an essay. It lets you visually map out an essay and then organize and expand these loose ideas into an increasingly coherent and nuanced project. As the following video will demonstrate, mind maps can take a variety of forms, but regardless of what your map looks like, mind maps offer an invaluable way to move past writer’s block and let your ideas flow.

• Watch the following video from Wisconsin Technical College System (WTCS) on mind mapping and free writing.
• When you’ve finished, use the template that follows to map out your essay! Don’t have a topic yet? Try the exercise embedded in the video itself.

Use This Mind Mapping Template to Map Out Your Paper!

Click Here to Download the PDF

Template Created by Scott Ortolano

Researching

Unlike quick prewriting activities, researching is best done slowly and methodically and, depending on the project, can take a considerable amount of time. Researching is exciting, as students activate their curiosity and learn about the topic, developing ideas about the direction of their writing. The goal of researching is to gain background understanding on a topic and to check one’s original ideas against those of experts. However, it is important for the writer to be aware that the process of conducting research can become a trap for procrastinators. Students often feel like researching a topic is the same as doing the assignment, but it’s not.

The two common writing traps frequently beset the unwary researcher:

• Writers start the research process too late so the information they find never really becomes their own. This often causes the writer to rely far too much upon quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing the words of others than is appropriate. Ideally, you want to use 70% your own words and 30% the words of others for college-level research-based writing.
• Writers become so involved in the research process that they don’t start the actual writing process soon enough so as to meet a due date with a well written, edited, and revised finished composition.

Being thoughtful about limiting one’s research time—and using a planner of some sort to organize one’s schedule—is a way to keep oneself from starting the research process too late.

• See Part V of this book for more information about researching.

Audience and Purpose

It’s important that writers identify the audience and the purpose of a piece of writing. To whom is the writer communicating? Why is the writer writing? Students often say they are writing for whomever is grading their work at the end. However, most students will be sharing their writing with peers and reviewers (e.g., writing tutors, peer mentors). The audience of any piece of college writing is, at the very minimum, the class as a whole. As such, it’s important for the writer to consider the expertise of the readers, which includes their peers and professors.

There are even broader applications for the kind of researched writing that you will do for this class and in your other college courses. For example, students could use their professor’s feedback to send their essay to a newspaper or a legislator or share it online for the purpose of informing or persuading decision-makers to make changes to improve the community. Good writers know their audience and maintain a purpose to mindfully help and intentionally shape their essays for meaning and impact. Students should think beyond their classroom and about how their writing could have an impact on their campus community, their neighborhood, and the wider world.

Planning the Structure of an Essay

Planning based on audience and purpose.

Identifying the target audience and purpose of an essay is a critical part of planning the structure and techniques that are best to use. It’s important to consider the following:

• Is the the purpose of the essay to educate, entertain, or persuade?
• Who might be interested in the topic of the essay?
• Who would be impacted by the essay or the information within it?
• What does the reader know about this topic?
• What does the reader need to know in order to understand the essay’s points?
• What kind of hook is necessary to engage the readers and their interest?
• What level of language is required? Words that are too subject-specific may make the writing difficult to grasp for readers unfamiliar with the topic.
• What is an appropriate tone for the topic? A humorous tone that is suitable for an autobiographical, narrative essay may not work for a more serious, persuasive essay.

Hint: Answers to these questions help the writer to make clear decisions about diction (i.e., the choice of words and phrases), form and organization, and the content of the essay.

Use Audience and Purpose to Plan Language

In many classrooms, students may encounter the concept of language in terms of correct versus incorrect. However, this textbook approaches language from the perspective of appropriateness. Writers should consider that there are different types of communities, each of which may have different perspectives about what is “appropriate language” and each of which may follow different rules, as John Swales discusses in “The Concept of Discourse Community.” Essentially, Swales defines discourse communities as “groups that have goals or purposes, and use communication to achieve these goals.”

Writers (and readers) may be more familiar with a home community that uses a different language than the language valued by the academic community. For example, many people in Hawai’i speak Hawai’i Creole English (HCE colloquially regarded as “Pidgin”), which is different from academic English. This does not mean that one language is better than another or that one community is homogeneous in terms of language use; most people “code-switch” from one “code” (i.e., language or way of speaking) to another. It helps writers to be aware and to use an intersectional lens to understand that while a community may value certain language practices, there are several types of language practices within our community.

What language practices does the academic discourse community value? The goal of first-year-writing courses is to prepare students to write according to the conventions of academia and Standard American English (SAE). Understanding and adhering to the rules of a different discourse community does not mean that students need to replace or drop their own discourse. They may add to their language repertoire as education continues to transform their experiences with language, both spoken and written. In addition to the linguistic abilities they already possess, they should enhance their academic writing skills for personal growth in order to meet the demands of the working world and to enrich the various communities they belong to.

Use Techniques to Plan Structure

Before writing a first draft, writers find it helpful to begin organizing their ideas into chunks so that they (and readers) can efficiently follow the points as organized in an essay.

First, it’s important to decide whether to organize an essay (or even just a paragraph) according to one of the following:

• Chronological order (organized by time)
• Spatial order (organized by physical space from one end to the other)
• Prioritized order (organized by order of importance)

There are many ways to plan an essay’s overall structure, including mapping and outlining.

Mapping (which sometimes includes using a graphic organizer) involves organizing the relationships between the topic and other ideas. The following is example (from ReadWriteThink.org, 2013) of a graphic organizer that could be used to write a basic, persuasive essay:

Outlining is also an excellent way to plan how to organize an essay. Formal outlines use levels of notes, with Roman numerals for the top level, followed by capital letters, Arabic numerals, and lowercase letters. Here’s an example:

• Hook/Lead/Opener: Leilani was shocked when a letter from Chicago said her “Aloha Poke” restaurant was infringing on a non-Hawaiian Midwest restaurant that had trademarked the words “aloha” (the Hawaiian word for love, compassion, mercy, and other things besides serving as a greeting) and “poke” (a Hawaiian dish of raw fish and seasonings).
• Background information about trademarks, the idea of language as property, the idea of cultural identity, and the question about who owns language and whether it can be owned.
• Thesis Statement (with the main point and previewing key or supporting points that become the topic sentences of the body paragraphs): While some business people use language and trademarks to turn a profit, the nation should consider that language cannot be owned by any one group or individual and that former (or current) imperialist and colonialist nations must consider the impact of their actions on culture and people groups. Therefore, legislators should bar the trademarking of non-English words for the good of internal peace of the country.
• Legislators should bar the trademarking of non-English words for the good and internal peace of the country.
• Conclusion (Revisit the Hook/Lead/Opener, Restate the Thesis, End with a Twist— a strong more globalized statement about why this topic was important to write about)

Note about outlines: Informal outlines can be created using lists with or without bullets. What is important is that main and subpoint ideas are linked and identified.

• Use 10 minutes to freewrite with the goal to “empty your cup”—writing about whatever is on your mind or blocking your attention on your classes, job, or family. This can be a great way to help you become centered, calm, or focused, especially when dealing with emotional challenges in your life.
• For each writing assignment in class, spend three 10-minute sessions either listing (brainstorming) or focused-writing about the topic before starting to organize and outline key ideas.
• Before each draft or revision of assignments, spend 10 minutes focused-writing an introduction and a thesis statement that lists all the key points that support the thesis statement.
• Have a discussion in your class about the various discourse communities that you and your classmates experience in your town.
• Create a graphic organizer that will help you write various types of essays.
• Create a metacognitive, self-reflective journal: Freewrite continuously (e.g., 5 times a week, for at least 10 minutes, at least half a page) about what you learned in class or during study time. Document how your used your study hours this week, how it felt to write in class and out of class, what you learned about writing and about yourself as a writer, how you saw yourself learning and evolving as a writer, what you learned about specific topics. What goals do you have for the next week?

During the second half of the semester, as you begin to tackle deeper and lengthier assignments, the journal should grow to at least one page per day, at least 20 minutes per day, as you use journal writing to reflect on writing strategies (e.g., structure, organization, rhetorical modes, research, incorporating different sources without plagiarizing, giving and receiving feedback, planning and securing time in your schedule for each task involved in a writing assignment) and your ideas about topics, answering research questions, and reflecting on what you found during research and during discussions with peers, mentors, tutors, and instructors. The journal then becomes a record of your journey as a writer, as well as a source of freewriting on content that you can shape into paragraphs for your various assignments.

Works Cited

Elbow, Peter. Writing Without Teachers . 2nd ed., 1973, Oxford UP, 1998.

Goldberg, Natalie. Wild Mind : Living the Writer’s Life. Bantam Books, 1990.

Swales, John. “The Concept of Discourse Community.” Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings , 1990, pp. 21-32.

For more about discourse communities, see the online class by Robert Mohrenne “ What is a Discourse Community? ” ENC 1102 13 Fall 0027. University of Central Florida, 2013.

Sources Used to Create This Chapter

The majority of the content for this section has been adapted from OER Material from “Prewriting, ” in Ann Inoshita, et al’s English Composition: Connect, Collaborate, Communicate (2019). This work was published under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States (CC BY 3.0 US) License.

Media Resources

Remixed and Compiled by Scott Ortolano

An Overview of Academic Writing, Planning, and Prewriting Copyright © by Leonard Owens III; Tim Bishop; and Scott Ortolano is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Prewriting and Outlining

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Get tips on developing and outlining your topic.

Prewriting exercises provide structure and meaning to your topic and research before you begin to write a draft. Using prewriting strategies to organize and generate ideas prevents a writer from becoming frustrated or stuck. Just as you would prepare to give a public speech on note cards, it is also necessary to write ideas down for a rough draft. After all, your audience is counting on a well-organized presentation of interesting facts, a storyline, or whatever you are required to write about. Prewriting exercises can help you focus your ideas, determine a topic, and develop a logical structure for your paper. 

Prewriting Exercises

Brainstorming:  It's often helpful to set a time limit on this; plan to brainstorm for ten minutes, for example. This will help you focus and keep you from feeling overwhelmed. This is especially helpful when you're still trying to narrow or focus your topic. You'll start with a blank page, and you'll write down as many ideas about your topic as you can think of. Ask yourself questions as you write: Why am I doing this? Why do I like this? Why don't I like this? What is the most interesting thing about this field or issue? How would my audience feel about this? What can we learn from this? How can we benefit from knowing more? When time is up, read over your list, and add anything else that you think of. Are there patterns or ideas that keep coming up? These are often clues about what is most important about this topic or issue.

Freewriting:  A time limit is also useful in this exercise. Using a blank piece of paper or your word-processing program, summarize your topic in a sentence and keep writing. Write anything that comes to your mind and don't stop. Don't worry about grammar or spelling, and if you get stuck, just write whatever comes to mind. Continue until your time limit is up, and when it's time to stop, read over what you've written and start underlining the most important or relevant ideas. This will help you to identify your most important ideas, and you'll often be surprised by what you come up with. 

Listing:  In this exercise, you'll simply list all of your ideas. This will help you when you are mapping or outlining your ideas, because as you use an idea, you can cross it off your list. 

Clustering:  This is another way to record your thoughts and observations for a paragraph or essay after you have chosen a topic. First draw a circle near the center of a blank piece of paper, and in that circle, write the subject of your essay or paragraph. Then in a ring around the main circle, write down the main parts or subtopics within the main topic. Circle each of these, and then draw a line connecting them to the main circle in the middle. Then think of other ideas, facts, or issues that relate to each of the main parts/subtopics, circle these, and draw lines connecting them to the relevant part/subtopic. Repeat this process with each new circle until you run out of ideas. This is a great way of identifying the parts within your topic, which will provide content for the paper, and it also helps you discover how these parts relate to each other. 

Outlining Your Paper 

An outline is a plan for the paper that will help you organize and structure your ideas in a way that effectively communicates them to your reader and supports your thesis statement. You'll want to work on an outline after you've completed some of the other exercises, since having an idea of what you'll say in the paper will make it much easier to write. An outline can be very informal; you might simply jot down your thesis statement, what the introduction will discuss, what you'll say in the body of the paper, and what you want to include in the conclusion. 

Remember that all writing — even academic writing — needs to tell a story: the introduction often describes what has already happened (the background or history of your topic), the body paragraphs might explain what is currently happening and what needs to happen (this often involves discussing a problem, the need for a solution, and possible solutions), and the conclusion usually looks to the future by focusing on what is likely to happen (what might happen next, and whether a solution is likely). If you work on telling a story in the paper, it will help you to structure it in a way that the reader can easily follow and understand. 

Sometimes you may be required (or you may want) to develop a more formal outline with numbered and lettered headings and subheadings. This will help you to demonstrate the relationships between the ideas, facts, and information within the paper. Here's an example of what this might look like: 

Introduction 

Fact that grabs audience attention 

Background/history of issue/problem/topic 

Thesis statement

Current state of issue/problem/topic 

Topic/claim sentence: Make a claim that explains what the paragraph is about 

Evidence that supports/explains the claim (this is often research from secondary sources) 

Analysis that explains how the evidence supports your claim and why this matters to the paper's thesis statement 

The need for a solution or course of action

Topic/claim 

Possible solution 

Conclusion 

What might happen now? 

Is a solution likely? 

What's the future of the issue? 

Your outline will contain more detailed information, and if there are certain areas that the assignment requires you to cover, then you can modify the outline to include these. You can also expand it if you're writing a longer research paper: the discussion of the problem might need several paragraphs, for example, and you might discuss the pros and cons of several possible solutions. 

The Effective Writing Center at UMGC:  Assignment Analysis and the Sentence Outline

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II. Getting Started

2.5 Prewriting

Kathryn Crowther; Lauren Curtright; Nancy Gilbert; Barbara Hall; Tracienne Ravita; Kirk Swenson; and Terri Pantuso

Loosely defined, prewriting includes all the writing strategies employed before writing your first draft. Although many more prewriting strategies exist, the following section covers using experience and observations, reading, freewriting, asking questions, listing, and clustering/idea mapping. Using the strategies in the following section can help you overcome the fear of the blank page and confidently begin the writing process.

Choosing a Topic

In addition to understanding that writing is a process , writers also understand that choosing a good general topic for an assignment is an essential first step. Sometimes your instructor will give you an idea to begin an assignment, and other times your instructor will ask you to come up with a topic on your own. A good topic not only covers what an assignment will be about, but it also fits the assignment’s purpose and its audience .

In the next few sections, you will follow a writer named Mariah as she explores and develops her essay’s topic and focus. You will also be planning one of your own. The first important step is for you to tell yourself why you are writing (to inform, to explain, or some other purpose) and for whom you are writing. Write your purpose and your audience on your own sheet of paper, and keep the paper close by as you read and write the first draft.

Experience and Observations

When selecting a topic, you may want to consider something that interests you or something based on your own life and personal experiences. Even everyday observations can lead to interesting topics. After writers think about their experiences and observations, they often take notes on paper to better develop their thoughts. These notes help writers discover what they have to say about their topic.

Reading plays a vital role in all the stages of the writing process, but it first figures in the development of ideas and topics. Different kinds of documents can help you choose and develop a topic. For example, a magazine cover advertising the latest research on the threat of global warming may catch your eye in the supermarket. This subject may interest you, and you may consider global warming as a topic. Or maybe a novel’s courtroom drama sparks your curiosity of a particular lawsuit or legal controversy.

After you choose a topic, critical reading is essential to the development of a topic. While reading almost any document, you evaluate the author’s point of view by thinking about his main idea and his support. When you judge the author’s argument, you discover more about not only the author’s opinion but also your own. If this step already seems daunting , remember that even the best writers need to use prewriting strategies to generate ideas.

Prewriting strategies depend on your critical reading skills. Reading, prewriting and brainstorming exercises (and outlines and drafts later in the writing process) will further develop your topic and ideas. As you continue to follow the writing process, you will see how Mariah uses critical reading skills to assess her own prewriting exercises.

Brainstorming

Brainstorming refers to writing techniques used to:

• Generate topic ideas
• Transfer your abstract thoughts on a topic into more concrete ideas on paper (or digitally on a computer screen)
• Organize the ideas you have generated to discover a focus and develop a working thesis

Although brainstorming techniques can be helpful in all stages of the writing process, you will have to find the techniques that are most effective for your writing needs. The following general strategies can be used when initially deciding on a topic, or for narrowing the focus for a topic: freewriting , asking questions , listing , and clustering/idea mapping .

In the initial stage of the writing process, it is fine if you choose a general topic. Later you can use brainstorming strategies to narrow the focus of the topic.

Freewriting

Freewriting is an exercise in which you write freely about any topic for a set amount of time (usually five to seven minutes). During the time limit, you may jot down any thoughts that come to your mind. Try not to worry about grammar, spelling, or punctuation. Instead, write as quickly as you can without stopping. If you get stuck, just copy the same word or phrase over and over again until you come up with a new thought.

Writing often comes easier when you have a personal connection with the topic you have chosen. Remember, to generate ideas in your freewriting, you may also think about readings that you have enjoyed or that have challenged your thinking. Doing this may lead your thoughts in interesting directions.

Quickly recording your thoughts on paper will help you discover what you have to say about a topic. When writing quickly, try not to doubt or question your ideas. Allow yourself to write freely and unselfconsciously. Once you start writing with few limitations, you may find you have more to say than you first realized. Your flow of thoughts can lead you to discover even more ideas about the topic. Freewriting may even lead you to discover another topic that excites you even more.

Look at Mariah’s example below. The instructor allowed the members of the class to choose their own topics, and Mariah thought about her experiences as a communications major. She used this freewriting exercise to help her generate more concrete ideas from her own experience.

Freewriting Example

Last semester my favorite class was about mass media. We got to study radio and television. People say we watch too much television, and even though I try not to, I end up watching a few reality shows just to relax. Everyone has to relax! It’s too hard to relax when something like the news (my husband watches all the time) is on because it’s too scary now. Too much bad news, not enough good news. News. Newspapers I don’t read as much anymore. I can get the headlines on my homepage when I check my email. Email could be considered mass media too these days. I used to go to the video store a few times a week before I started school, but now the only way I know what movies are current is to listen for the Oscar nominations. We have cable but we can’t afford movie channels, so I sometimes look at older movies late at night. UGH. A few of them get played again and again until you’re sick of them. My husband thinks I’m crazy, but sometimes there are old black-and-whites on from the 1930s and ‘40s. I could never live my life in black-and-white. I like the home decorating shows and love how people use color on their walls. Makes rooms look so bright. When we buy a home, if we ever can, I’ll use lots of color. Some of those shows even show you how to do major renovations by yourself. Knock down walls and everything. Not for me–or my husband. I’m handier than he is. I wonder if they could make a reality show about us?

Asking Questions

Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?

In everyday situations, you pose these kinds of questions to get more information. Who will be my partner for the project? When is the next meeting? Why is my car making that odd noise? When faced with a writing assignment, you might ask yourself, “How do I begin?”

You seek the answers to these questions to gain knowledge, to better understand your daily experiences, and to plan for the future. Asking these types of questions will also help you with the writing process. As you choose your topic, answering these questions can help you revisit the ideas you already have and generate new ways to think about your topic. You may also discover aspects of the topic that are unfamiliar to you and that you would like to learn more about. All these idea-gathering techniques will help you plan for future work on your assignment.

When Mariah reread her freewriting notes, she found she had rambled and her thoughts were disjointed. She realized that the topic that interested her most was the one she started with, the media. She then decided to explore that topic by asking herself questions about it. Her purpose was to refine media into a topic she felt comfortable writing about. To see how asking questions can help you choose a topic, take a look at the following chart that Mariah completed to record her questions and answers. She asked herself the questions that reporters and journalists use to gather information for their stories. The questions are often called the 5WH questions, after their initial letters.

Asking Questions Example

Narrowing the Focus

After rereading her essay assignment, Mariah realized her general topic, mass media, is too broad for her class’s short paper requirement. Three pages are not enough to cover all the concerns in mass media today. Mariah also realized that although her readers are other communications majors who are interested in the topic, they might want to read a paper about a particular issue in mass media.

The prewriting techniques of brainstorming by freewriting and asking questions helped Mariah think more about her topic, but the following prewriting strategies can help her (and you) narrow the focus of the topic:

• Clustering/Idea Mapping

Narrowing the focus means breaking up the topic into subtopics, or more specific points. Generating lots of subtopics will help you eventually select the ones that fit the assignment and appeal to you and your audience.

Listing is a term often applied to describe any prewriting technique writers use to generate ideas on a topic, including freewriting and asking questions. You can make a list on your own or in a group with your classmates. Start with a blank sheet of paper (or a blank computer screen) and write your general topic across the top. Underneath your topic, make a list of more specific ideas. Think of your general topic as a broad category and the list items as things that fit in that category. Often you will find that one item can lead to the next, creating a flow of ideas that can help you narrow your focus to a more specific paper topic. The following is Mariah’s brainstorming list.

Mariah’s Brainstorming List

• Broadcasting
• Radio Television
• Gaming/Video Games
• Internet Cell Phones
• Smart Phones
• Text Messages
• Tiny Cameras

From this list, Mariah could narrow her focus to a particular technology under the broad category of “mass media.”

Idea Mapping

Idea mapping, sometimes called clustering or webbing, allows you to visualize your ideas on paper using circles, lines, and arrows. This technique is also known as clustering because ideas are broken down and clustered, or grouped, together. Many writers like this method because the shapes show how the ideas relate or connect, and writers can find a focused topic from the connections mapped. Using idea mapping, you might discover interesting connections between topics that you had not thought of before.

To create an idea map:

• Start by writing your general topic in a circle in the center of a blank sheet of paper. Moving out from the main circle, write down as many concepts and terms ideas you can think of related to your general topic in blank areas of the page. Jot down your ideas quickly–do not overthink your responses. Try to fill the page.
• Once you’ve filled the page, circle the concepts and terms that are relevant to your topic. Use lines or arrows to categorize and connect closely related ideas. Add and cluster as many ideas as you can think of.

To continue brainstorming, Mariah tried idea mapping. Review Mariah’s idea map in Figure 2.5.1. [1]

Mariah’s Idea Map

Notice Mariah’s largest circle contains her general topic, mass media. Then, the general topic branches into two subtopics written in two smaller circles: television and radio. The subtopic television branches into even more specific topics: cable and DVDs. From there, Mariah drew more circles and wrote more specific ideas: high definition and digital recording from cable and Blu-ray from DVDs. The radio topic led Mariah to draw connections between music, downloads versus CDs, and, finally, piracy. From this idea map, Mariah saw she could consider narrowing the focus of her mass media topic to the more specific topic of music piracy.

Topic Checklist: Developing a Good Topic

• Am I interested in this topic?
• Would my audience be interested?
• Do I have prior knowledge or experience with this topic? If so, would I be comfortable exploring this topic and sharing my experience?
• Do I want to learn more about this topic?
• Is this topic specific?
• Does it fit the length of the assignment?

Prewriting strategies are a vital first step in the writing process. First, they help you choose a broad topic, and then they help you narrow the focus of the topic to a more specific idea. An effective topic ensures that you are ready for the next step: Developing a working thesis and planning the organization of your essay by creating an outline.

Purpose of an Outline

Once your topic has been chosen, your ideas have been generated through brainstorming techniques, and you’ve developed a working thesis, the next step in the prewriting stage might be to create an outline. Sometimes called a “blueprint,” or “plan” for your paper, an outline helps writers organize their thoughts and categorize the main points they wish to make in an order that makes sense.

The purpose of an outline is to help you organize your paper by checking to see if and how your ideas connect to each other, or whether you need to flesh out a point or two. No matter the length of the paper, from a three-page weekly assignment to a 50-page senior thesis , outlines can help you see the overall picture. Having an outline also helps prevent writers from “getting stuck” when writing the first draft of an essay.

A well-developed outline will show the essential elements of an essay:

• thesis of essay
• main idea of each body paragraph
• evidence/support offered in each paragraph to substantiate the main points

A well-developed outline breaks down the parts of your thesis in a clear, hierarchical manner. Writing an outline before beginning an essay helps the writer organize ideas generated through brainstorming and/or research. In short, a well-developed outline makes your paper easier to write.

The formatting of any outline is not arbitrary ; the system of formatting and number/letter designations creates a visual hierarchy of the ideas, or points, being made in the essay. Major points, in other words, should not be buried in subtopic levels.

Outlines can also be used for revision , oftentimes referred to as backwards, or reverse, outlines. When using an outline for revision purposes, you can identify issues with organization or even find new directions in which to take your essay.

Creating an Outline

• Identify your topic. Put the topic in your own words with a single sentence or phrase to help you stay on topic.
• Determine your main points. What are the main points you want to make to convince your audience? Refer back to the prewriting/brainstorming exercise of answering 5WH questions: “why or how is the main topic important?” Using your brainstorming notes, you should be able to create a working thesis .
• List your main points/ideas in a logical order. You can always change the order later as you evaluate your outline.
• Create sub-points for each major idea. Typically, each time you have a new number or letter, there needs to be at least two points (i.e. if you have an A, you need a B; if you have a 1, you need a 2; etc.). Though perhaps frustrating at first, it is indeed useful because it forces you to think hard about each point. If you can’t create two points, then reconsider including the first in your paper, as it may be extraneous information that may detract from your argument.
• Evaluate. Review your organizational plan, your blueprint for your paper. Does each paragraph have a controlling idea/topic sentence? Is each point adequately supported? Look over what you have written. Does it make logical sense? Is each point suitably fleshed out? Is there anything included that is unnecessary?

Sample Outline

Thesis: Moving college courses to an asynchronous online environment is an effective way of preventing the spread of COVID-19 and offers more students the opportunity to participate.

• Students don’t have to be on-campus, avoiding high-contact living situations
• Students don’t have to travel, avoiding buses and other high-contact travel environments
• Students don’t have to sit in lecture halls, avoiding extended indoor exposure
• Students complete group work via chat rooms or online platforms.
• Students don’t have to touch shared seating, doors, etc.
• Students don’t have to share lab equipment or other materials
• This affords students the ability to complete coursework around a job schedule.
• This format is often family-friendly for those who have children or other familial responsibilities.
• Students may be at high risk or have family members who are high risk
• The reduced exposure of an online environment allows these students to participate without increasing their risk

Practice Activity

This section contains material from:

Crowther, Kathryn, Lauren Curtright, Nancy Gilbert, Barbara Hall, Tracienne Ravita, and Kirk Swenson. Successful College Composition . 2nd edition. Book 8. Georgia: English Open Textbooks, 2016. http://oer.galileo.usg.edu/english-textbooks/8 . Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License . Archival link: https://web.archive.org/web/20230711203012/https://oer.galileo.usg.edu/english-textbooks/8/

• “Mariah’s Idea Map” was derived by Brandi Gomez from an image in: Kathryn Crowther et al, Successful College Composition, 2nd ed. Book 8. (Georgia: English Open Textbooks, 2016),   http://oer.galileo.usg.edu/english-textbooks/8 . Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License . ↵

The method or operation by which something is done or accomplished; a series of continuous actions that result in the achievement of a goal. The writing process refers to the sequence of steps that result in an essay, research paper, or other piece of writing.

The person or group of people who view and analyze the work of a writer, researcher, or other content creator.

Necessary or critical for existence; indispensable or integral.

Intimidating, threatening, or fear-inducing.

To present or put forward an idea.

A statement, usually one sentence, that summarizes an argument that will later be explained, expanded upon, and developed in a longer essay or research paper. In undergraduate writing, a thesis statement is often found in the introductory paragraph of an essay. The plural of thesis is theses .

A lengthy research paper written as part of a graduation requirement for someone who is close to completing their undergraduate requirements for their major and is in their final year of undergraduate study. Like a master’s thesis or a doctoral dissertation, a senior thesis is written to demonstrate mastery over specific subject matter.

The essence of something; those things that compose the foundational elements of a thing; the basics.

Justify, affirm, or corroborate; to show evidence of; to back up a statement, idea, or argument.

A system involving rank. Hierarchical refers to a system that involves a hierarchy. For example, the military is a hierarchical system in which some people outrank others.

To be subject to the judgment of a whim, chance, or personal preference; the opposite of a standardized law, regulation, or rule.

An altered version of  a written work. Revising means to rewrite in order to improve and make corrections. Unlike editing, which involves minor changes, revisions include major and noticeable changes to a written work.

Irrelevant, unneeded, or unnecessary.

Occurring at a different time; not occurring at the same time; asynchronous learning refers to work that can be done by a student independently without real-time interaction or guidance from an instructor.

2.5 Prewriting Copyright © 2023 by Kathryn Crowther; Lauren Curtright; Nancy Gilbert; Barbara Hall; Tracienne Ravita; Kirk Swenson; and Terri Pantuso is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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6.8: Prewriting Strategies

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Learning Objectives

• Describe and use prewriting strategies (such as journaling, mapping, questioning, sketching)

Prewriting has no set structure or organization; it is usually just a collection of ideas that may find themselves in your paper over time. Prewriting is also a great way to get past writer’s block—that period of time when you find you have no ideas or don’t know how to put your thoughts together. There is no right or wrong way to approach prewriting, but there are some strategies that can get you thinking. You already learned about brainstorming and freewriting, but there are other helpful techniques to get you started that include journaling, mapping, questioning, and sketching.

Many people write in personal journals (or online blogs). Writers not only record events in journals, but also reflect and record thoughts, observations, questions, and feelings. They are safe spaces to record your experience of the world.

Use a journal to write about an experience you had, different reactions you have observed to the same situation, a current item in the news, an ethical problem at work, an incident with one of your children, a memorable childhood experience of your own, etc. Try to probe the why or how of the situation.

Journals can help you develop ideas for writing. When you review your journal entries, you may find that you keep coming back to a particular topic, or that you have written a lot about one topic in a specific entry, or that you’re really passionate about an issue. Those are the topics, then, about which you obviously have something to say. Those are the topics you might develop further in a piece of writing.

Here’s one sample journal entry. Read through it and look for ideas that the writer might develop further in a piece of writing:

The hot issue here has been rising gas prices. People in our town are mostly commuters who work in the state capitol and have to drive about 30 miles each way to and from work. One local gas station has been working with the gas company to establish a gas cooperative, where folks who joined would pay a bit less per gallon. I don’t know whether I like this idea – it’s like joining one of those stores where you have to pay to shop there. You’ve got to buy a lot to recoup your membership fee. I wonder if this is a ploy of the gas company???? Others were talking about starting a petition to the local commuter bus service, to add more routes and times, as the current service isn’t enough to address workers’ schedules and needs. Still others are talking about initiating a light rail system, but this is an alternative that will take a lot of years and won’t address the situation immediately. I remember the gas crunch a number of years ago and remember that we simply started to carpool. In the Washington, DC area, with its huge traffic problems and large number of commuters, carpooling is so accepted that there are designated parking and pickup places along the highway, and it’s apparently accepted for strangers to pull over, let those waiting know where they’re headed, and offer rides. I’m not certain I’d go that far . . .

https://assessments.lumenlearning.co...essments/20255

Mapping Strategy

Mapping or diagramming is similar to freewriting, but the outcome often looks more like a list of related ideas. This strategy is quite similar to brainstorming where the listed ideas may or may not be connected with arrows or lines. You should set a time limit of 5 to 10 minutes and jot down all the ideas you have about the topic. Instead of writing sentences, you are quickly jotting down ideas, perhaps showing connections and building a map of your thoughts. Here are some online tools that can help with this process:

• MindMeister

Mapping and diagramming may help you create information on a topic, and/or organize information from a list or freewriting entries, as a map provides a visual for the types of information you’ve generated about a topic. For example:

Questioning Strategy

This is a basic strategy, useful at many levels, that helps you jot down the basic important information about a topic. Starting by asking the questions who? what? when? where? why? and how? For example, below are answers created for the topic: What is the impact of traditional ecological knowledge on environmental management?

• Who? The Dene and Kissi tribes from two different ecosystems were impacted by European colonizers and their fire management policies.
• What? Consider the impact of fire on the peoples in both environments.
• Where? Canadian policies and historical data compared to African policies and historical data.
• When? As far back as the last ice age, there is evidence of how fire has impacted the land. I will focus on the impact of colonization and the policies that affected the land management practices of the indigenous peoples. I will also consider the current implications of controlling and preventing fires.
• Why? This information is important because the knowledge from the indigenous peoples and their traditional practices provides important insights into how to improve current fire practices.
• How? Look at historical and current records, such as Lewis, Wuerthner, Fairhead and Leach . . .

Notice how this series of questions and answers is more developed than this topic would be if you were thinking about it for the first time. This author has done a bit of preliminary reading on the subject between the two prewriting activities. This helps illustrate how prewriting can be useful to return to, even after later stages of the writing process.

If you have a broad topic you want to write about, but don’t quite know how to narrow it, you can also ask defining questions to help you develop your main idea for writing. For example, if you want to write about school taxes, you could ask:

• Why do only property owners (and not renters) in New York State pay school taxes?
• What percent of overall school funding comes from school taxes?
• Do other states fund schools in the same way?
• Does the state lottery system, initially designed to fund schools, actually support schools?
• Is there a limit to paying school taxes when one gets older and no longer has children in school?

Once you have your questions, you can work with the list to group related questions, and then decide whether your writing can logically deal with a number of the questions together or only one. Use questioning to help develop a focus for your writing.

Sketching Strategy

A picture is worth a thousand words. Your first thinking is done in pictures. So, if you are a visual learner and like to sketch out your thoughts, grab a pen and paper and draw what you are thinking. This strategy is especially effective if you are trying to conceptualize an idea or clarify relationships between parts of an idea.

Sketching involves drawing out your ideas using a pen and paper. One strategy that can be useful for planning comparison and contrast type papers is a Venn diagram . A Venn diagram is a strategy that uses two (or more) overlapping circles to show relationships between sets of ideas. The information written where two circles overlap is common to both ideas. The information written outside the overlapping area is information distinct to only one of the ideas.

Sketching Example

Explore the sketch of a Venn diagram created for the topic: What is the impact of traditional ecological knowledge on environmental management?

Notice how this Venn Diagram is even more developed than the same topic explored previously. This author has done even deeper research on the subject, demonstrated by the citations given after some facts here. Again, this helps illustrate how prewriting can be useful to return to, even after later stages of the writing process.

Of course, this is not a comprehensive list of prewriting strategies. You may find that some of these are helpful for certain types of writing projects, or you may prefer other strategies such as making lists, bulleting key points, or writing out pros and cons. Whichever strategy you choose, be sure to save your prewriting work. You may want to revisit this stage of the writing process again to make sure that you captured all your thoughts in your outline or first draft. You may also want to do more prewriting in the middle of your writing project if you need some help overcoming writer’s block.

Contributors and Attributions

• Revision and Adaptation. Provided by : Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution
• Mapping. Provided by : Excelsior OWL. Located at : https://owl.excelsior.edu/writing-process/prewriting-strategies/prewriting-strategies-mapping/ . License : CC BY: Attribution
• Prewriting. Provided by : Lethbridge College. Located at : www.lethbridgecollege.net/elearningcafe/index.php/writing/the-writing-process/prewriting. Project : eLearning Cafe. License : CC BY: Attribution
• Freewriting. Provided by : Excelsior OWL. Located at : https://owl.excelsior.edu/writing-process/prewriting-strategies/prewriting-strategies-freewriting/ . License : CC BY: Attribution
• Journaling. Provided by : Excelsior OWL. Located at : https://owl.excelsior.edu/writing-process/prewriting-strategies/prewriting-strategies-journaling/ . License : CC BY: Attribution

an Excelsior University site

Prewriting Strategies

Writing is a creative project, and writers go through the same messy stage. For writers, the development stage involves playing with words and ideas—playing with writing. Prewriting is the start of the writing process, the messy, “play” stage in which writers jot down, develop, and try out different ideas, the stage in which it’s fine to be free-ranging in thought and language. Prewriting is intended to be free-flowing, to be a time in which you let your ideas and words flow without caring about organization, grammar, and the formalities of writing.

There are many ways to develop ideas for writing, including:

• Freewriting
• Brainstorming
• Mapping or diagramming
• Asking defining questions
• Noting Pros & Cons

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Check out other great resources:

Paradigm Online Writing Assistant

Excellent resource maintained by Boise State University. Offers excellent support on argument and strategies for the entire writing process.

The Professor’s Perch: Quit Facebook and Start Writing Again with Prewriting Strategies

A blog post from Hoot – The Excelsior OWL Blog all about prewriting.

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Use pre-writing strategies to generate and organize ideas

Before you dive into writing an academic paper, it's helpful to brainstorm and organize your thoughts. The pre-writing strategies below will help you define, clarify,  and connect related topics . Doing preliminary research in encyclopedias can reveal basic understanding of a broad topic and help you complete these pre-writing strategies. The library database Gale Virtual Reference Library is a good place to find a variety of subject-specific encyclopedias for background information. Students can also meet with a writing tutor to talk out their ideas and develop a plan for an academic paper.

 An outline for an essay is a list of main topics with supporting details associated with a preliminary thesis statement. Outlining is a helpful way to plan out an essay so you know what you want to discuss and in what order.

Outline Example:

Working thesis: Waiting tables at a diner was my worst job.

• opening remarks on what makes a job bad
• long hours, on my feet all day
• heavy plates/trays, arms and wrists hurt
• little hourly wage, lousy tips
• difficult management/co-workers/customers - give particular examples
• thesis restated
• closing remarks on finding a more fulfilling job

 Cluster Mapping

Clustering, also called mind mapping, is a more visual way to organize ideas. It's a good strategy to see connections between ideas. This technique can work well in conjunction with other prewriting strategies. For example, organize and connect ideas with a cluster map after pulling out topics and details from a freewriting session.

The University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has a useful digital mind mapping tool  to help you generate ideas and narrow a topic. GoConqr also has a digital mind mapping tool, but you have to create an account in order to create a mind map.

Journalistic Questions

 Journalists ask questions like Why? How? When? Where? In what ways? Asking questions about the topic you are writing about is a good way to generate ideas and to look at the topic from different angles. Write down your questions along with answers you brainstorm and research.

Below are some generic examples of journalistic questions. Ask a friend to ask you questions about your topic to help you generate questions and possible answers to explore further.

Examples of using journalistic questions to generate ideas

How: How is the issue significant? How can the problem be resolved? How are people affected by it?

Why:  Why did the issue arise? Why is it an issue at all?

Where: Where is this issue important? Where are the effects of this issue most keenly felt?

What: What are some other ways to describe this topic? What are different definitions of this topic? What are some opposing viewpoints related to this topic? What is the significance of this topic? What historical influences have led to this issue?

When:  When was this issue most apparent? When did it develop? When in history was it looked upon differently? When is action needed to address the problem?

Who:  Who is affected by the issue? Who stands to gain or lose? Who are the primary players and secondary players?

Freewriting

 Freewriting helps get out ideas without the stress of finding the exact words, organizing information correctly, spelling, or grammar. A writer's inner critic to "say the right thing" can get in the way of simply starting. Start freewriting by setting a goal to write nonstop for a specific length of time (ten minutes for example). Don't inhibit yourself if you get stuck. Write "I don't know what else to say" until something else comes to mind.  The purpose is to write so fast that self-editing doesn't get in the way of the brainstorming process. Don't worry about being "right" or making mistakes; you are just thinking through writing.

After the freewriting session is done, look through the passage and pull out any nuggets of information that are worthwhile keeping and expanding on further. It is also helpful to do another freewriting session but focused on a specific topic generated in the first freewriting brainstorm. Repeat the process as many times as needed.

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Prewriting: Developing Ideas

How do writers develop ideas for writing? Writers use many techniques, and it's a bet that most of the techniques involve writing itself. Think of a composer creating ideas for a song by playing notes on a piano keyboard. Think of a sculptor creating ideas for a statue by shaping and reshaping pieces of clay. Think of a quilter creating ideas for a quilt pattern by arranging and rearranging different snippets of fabric. All creative endeavors go through preliminary stages in which creators generate ideas, discard some, and play with others that capture their imaginations or that seem to "fit the bill." Each creator develops ideas by getting immersed and "doodling" in the particular medium. And writing is no different. In writer's terms, that preliminary stage of idea development is called "prewriting."

Prewriting usually is messy in terms of having ideas scattered all over the place--think of the quilter with pieces of fabric all over the living room floor. For a lot of people, it's liberating to be messy and not worry about logic, pattern, or final form. That's the purpose of prewriting, to be as free-ranging as possible in generating ideas. If you're aggravated by mess, then prewriting can be thought of as pre-planning, as a means of generating the ideas and data that will help you create the essay draft. Either way, prewriting is a stage of idea incubation, a way to generate ideas and capture your thoughts through writing.

Ideas for writing develop in many ways, and prewriting techniques try to reflect the different ways in which ideas can develop. Some forms of prewriting are intended to help you bring subconscious ideas and interests into consciousness (some forms help if you tend to draw a blank when you're asked to "write about what interests you"):

• Freewriting
• Brainstorming
• Clustering/mapping
• Maintaining a personal journal

Other forms of prewriting are intended to help you generate your own ideas in response to others' ideas:

• Responding to a text
• Maintaining a response journal

Still other forms of prewriting are intended to help you both generate and focus ideas about a subject that you've already chosen:

• Asking questions about a subject
• Making a list
• Working with prewriting

Need Assistance?

If you would like assistance with any type of writing assignment, learning coaches are available to assist you. Please contact Academic Support by emailing [email protected].

Questions or feedback about SUNY Empire's Writing Support?

Contact us at [email protected] .

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• A step-by-step guide to the writing process

The Writing Process | 5 Steps with Examples & Tips

Published on April 24, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on December 8, 2023.

Good academic writing requires effective planning, drafting, and revision.

The writing process looks different for everyone, but there are five basic steps that will help you structure your time when writing any kind of text.

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Table of contents

Step 1: prewriting, step 2: planning and outlining, step 3: writing a first draft, step 4: redrafting and revising, step 5: editing and proofreading, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about the writing process.

Before you start writing, you need to decide exactly what you’ll write about and do the necessary research.

Coming up with a topic

If you have to come up with your own topic for an assignment, think of what you’ve covered in class— is there a particular area that intrigued, interested, or even confused you? Topics that left you with additional questions are perfect, as these are questions you can explore in your writing.

The scope depends on what type of text you’re writing—for example, an essay or a research paper will be less in-depth than a dissertation topic . Don’t pick anything too ambitious to cover within the word count, or too limited for you to find much to say.

Narrow down your idea to a specific argument or question. For example, an appropriate topic for an essay might be narrowed down like this:

Doing the research

Once you know your topic, it’s time to search for relevant sources and gather the information you need. This process varies according to your field of study and the scope of the assignment. It might involve:

• Searching for primary and secondary sources .
• Reading the relevant texts closely (e.g. for literary analysis ).
• Collecting data using relevant research methods (e.g. experiments , interviews or surveys )

From a writing perspective, the important thing is to take plenty of notes while you do the research. Keep track of the titles, authors, publication dates, and relevant quotations from your sources; the data you gathered; and your initial analysis or interpretation of the questions you’re addressing.

Especially in academic writing , it’s important to use a logical structure to convey information effectively. It’s far better to plan this out in advance than to try to work out your structure once you’ve already begun writing.

Creating an essay outline is a useful way to plan out your structure before you start writing. This should help you work out the main ideas you want to focus on and how you’ll organize them. The outline doesn’t have to be final—it’s okay if your structure changes throughout the writing process.

Use bullet points or numbering to make your structure clear at a glance. Even for a short text that won’t use headings, it’s useful to summarize what you’ll discuss in each paragraph.

An outline for a literary analysis essay might look something like this:

• Describe the theatricality of Austen’s works
• Outline the role theater plays in Mansfield Park
• Introduce the research question: How does Austen use theater to express the characters’ morality in Mansfield Park ?
• Discuss Austen’s depiction of the performance at the end of the first volume
• Discuss how Sir Bertram reacts to the acting scheme
• Introduce Austen’s use of stage direction–like details during dialogue
• Explore how these are deployed to show the characters’ self-absorption
• Discuss Austen’s description of Maria and Julia’s relationship as polite but affectionless
• Compare Mrs. Norris’s self-conceit as charitable despite her idleness
• Summarize the three themes: The acting scheme, stage directions, and the performance of morals
• Answer the research question
• Indicate areas for further study

Once you have a clear idea of your structure, it’s time to produce a full first draft.

This process can be quite non-linear. For example, it’s reasonable to begin writing with the main body of the text, saving the introduction for later once you have a clearer idea of the text you’re introducing.

To give structure to your writing, use your outline as a framework. Make sure that each paragraph has a clear central focus that relates to your overall argument.

Hover over the parts of the example, from a literary analysis essay on Mansfield Park , to see how a paragraph is constructed.

The character of Mrs. Norris provides another example of the performance of morals in Mansfield Park . Early in the novel, she is described in scathing terms as one who knows “how to dictate liberality to others: but her love of money was equal to her love of directing” (p. 7). This hypocrisy does not interfere with her self-conceit as “the most liberal-minded sister and aunt in the world” (p. 7). Mrs. Norris is strongly concerned with appearing charitable, but unwilling to make any personal sacrifices to accomplish this. Instead, she stage-manages the charitable actions of others, never acknowledging that her schemes do not put her own time or money on the line. In this way, Austen again shows us a character whose morally upright behavior is fundamentally a performance—for whom the goal of doing good is less important than the goal of seeming good.

When you move onto a different topic, start a new paragraph. Use appropriate transition words and phrases to show the connections between your ideas.

The goal at this stage is to get a draft completed, not to make everything perfect as you go along. Once you have a full draft in front of you, you’ll have a clearer idea of where improvement is needed.

Give yourself a first draft deadline that leaves you a reasonable length of time to revise, edit, and proofread before the final deadline. For a longer text like a dissertation, you and your supervisor might agree on deadlines for individual chapters.

Now it’s time to look critically at your first draft and find potential areas for improvement. Redrafting means substantially adding or removing content, while revising involves making changes to structure and reformulating arguments.

Evaluating the first draft

It can be difficult to look objectively at your own writing. Your perspective might be positively or negatively biased—especially if you try to assess your work shortly after finishing it.

It’s best to leave your work alone for at least a day or two after completing the first draft. Come back after a break to evaluate it with fresh eyes; you’ll spot things you wouldn’t have otherwise.

When evaluating your writing at this stage, you’re mainly looking for larger issues such as changes to your arguments or structure. Starting with bigger concerns saves you time—there’s no point perfecting the grammar of something you end up cutting out anyway.

Right now, you’re looking for:

• Arguments that are unclear or illogical.
• Areas where information would be better presented in a different order.
• Passages where additional information or explanation is needed.
• Passages that are irrelevant to your overall argument.

For example, in our paper on Mansfield Park , we might realize the argument would be stronger with more direct consideration of the protagonist Fanny Price, and decide to try to find space for this in paragraph IV.

For some assignments, you’ll receive feedback on your first draft from a supervisor or peer. Be sure to pay close attention to what they tell you, as their advice will usually give you a clearer sense of which aspects of your text need improvement.

Redrafting and revising

Once you’ve decided where changes are needed, make the big changes first, as these are likely to have knock-on effects on the rest. Depending on what your text needs, this step might involve:

• Making changes to your overall argument.
• Reordering the text.
• Cutting parts of the text.
• Adding new text.

You can go back and forth between writing, redrafting and revising several times until you have a final draft that you’re happy with.

Think about what changes you can realistically accomplish in the time you have. If you are running low on time, you don’t want to leave your text in a messy state halfway through redrafting, so make sure to prioritize the most important changes.

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Editing focuses on local concerns like clarity and sentence structure. Proofreading involves reading the text closely to remove typos and ensure stylistic consistency. You can check all your drafts and texts in minutes with an AI proofreader .

Editing for grammar and clarity

When editing, you want to ensure your text is clear, concise, and grammatically correct. You’re looking out for:

• Grammatical errors.
• Ambiguous phrasings.
• Redundancy and repetition .

In your initial draft, it’s common to end up with a lot of sentences that are poorly formulated. Look critically at where your meaning could be conveyed in a more effective way or in fewer words, and watch out for common sentence structure mistakes like run-on sentences and sentence fragments:

• Austen’s style is frequently humorous, her characters are often described as “witty.” Although this is less true of Mansfield Park .
• Austen’s style is frequently humorous. Her characters are often described as “witty,” although this is less true of Mansfield Park .

To make your sentences run smoothly, you can always use a paraphrasing tool to rewrite them in a clearer way.

Proofreading for small mistakes and typos

When proofreading, first look out for typos in your text:

• Spelling errors.
• Missing words.
• Confused word choices .
• Punctuation errors .
• Missing or excess spaces.

Use a grammar checker , but be sure to do another manual check after. Read through your text line by line, watching out for problem areas highlighted by the software but also for any other issues it might have missed.

For example, in the following phrase we notice several errors:

• Mary Crawfords character is a complicate one and her relationships with Fanny and Edmund undergoes several transformations through out the novel.
• Mary Crawford’s character is a complicated one, and her relationships with both Fanny and Edmund undergo several transformations throughout the novel.

Proofreading for stylistic consistency

There are several issues in academic writing where you can choose between multiple different standards. For example:

• Whether you use the serial comma .
• Whether you use American or British spellings and punctuation (you can use a punctuation checker for this).
• Where you use numerals vs. words for numbers.
• How you capitalize your titles and headings.

Unless you’re given specific guidance on these issues, it’s your choice which standards you follow. The important thing is to consistently follow one standard for each issue. For example, don’t use a mixture of American and British spellings in your paper.

Additionally, you will probably be provided with specific guidelines for issues related to format (how your text is presented on the page) and citations (how you acknowledge your sources). Always follow these instructions carefully.

If you want to know more about AI for academic writing, AI tools, or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

• Ad hominem fallacy
• Post hoc fallacy
• Appeal to authority fallacy
• False cause fallacy
• Sunk cost fallacy
• Deep learning
• Generative AI
• Machine learning
• Reinforcement learning
• Supervised vs. unsupervised learning

 (AI) Tools

• Grammar Checker
• Paraphrasing Tool
• Text Summarizer
• AI Detector
• Plagiarism Checker
• Citation Generator

Revising, proofreading, and editing are different stages of the writing process .

• Revising is making structural and logical changes to your text—reformulating arguments and reordering information.
• Editing refers to making more local changes to things like sentence structure and phrasing to make sure your meaning is conveyed clearly and concisely.
• Proofreading involves looking at the text closely, line by line, to spot any typos and issues with consistency and correct them.

Whether you’re publishing a blog, submitting a research paper , or even just writing an important email, there are a few techniques you can use to make sure it’s error-free:

• Take a break : Set your work aside for at least a few hours so that you can look at it with fresh eyes.
• Proofread a printout : Staring at a screen for too long can cause fatigue – sit down with a pen and paper to check the final version.
• Use digital shortcuts : Take note of any recurring mistakes (for example, misspelling a particular word, switching between US and UK English , or inconsistently capitalizing a term), and use Find and Replace to fix it throughout the document.

If you want to be confident that an important text is error-free, it might be worth choosing a professional proofreading service instead.

If you’ve gone over the word limit set for your assignment, shorten your sentences and cut repetition and redundancy during the editing process. If you use a lot of long quotes , consider shortening them to just the essentials.

If you need to remove a lot of words, you may have to cut certain passages. Remember that everything in the text should be there to support your argument; look for any information that’s not essential to your point and remove it.

To make this process easier and faster, you can use a paraphrasing tool . With this tool, you can rewrite your text to make it simpler and shorter. If that’s not enough, you can copy-paste your paraphrased text into the summarizer . This tool will distill your text to its core message.

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A clear, arguable thesis will tell your readers where you are going to end up, but it can also help you figure out how to get them there. Put your thesis at the top of a blank page and then make a list of the points you will need to make to argue that thesis effectively.

For example, consider this example from the thesis handout : While Sandel argues persuasively that our instinct to “remake”(54) ourselves into something ever more perfect is a problem, his belief that we can always draw a line between what is medically necessary and what makes us simply “better than well”(51) is less convincing.

To argue this thesis, the author needs to do the following:

• Show what is persuasive about Sandel’s claims about the problems with striving for perfection.
• Show what is not convincing about Sandel’s claim that we can clearly distinguish between medically necessary enhancements and other enhancements.

Once you have broken down your thesis into main claims, you can then think about what sub-claims you will need to make in order to support each of those main claims. That step might look like this:

• Evidence that Sandel provides to support this claim
• Discussion of why this evidence is convincing even in light of potential counterarguments
• Discussion of cases when medically necessary enhancement and non-medical enhancement cannot be easily distinguished
• Analysis of what those cases mean for Sandel’s argument
• Consideration of counterarguments (what Sandel might say in response to this section of your argument)

Each argument you will make in an essay will be different, but this strategy will often be a useful first step in figuring out the path of your argument.  

Strategy #2: Use subheadings, even if you remove them later  

Scientific papers generally include standard subheadings to delineate different sections of the paper, including “introduction,” “methods,” and “discussion.” Even when you are not required to use subheadings, it can be helpful to put them into an early draft to help you see what you’ve written and to begin to think about how your ideas fit together. You can do this by typing subheadings above the sections of your draft.

If you’re having trouble figuring out how your ideas fit together, try beginning with informal subheadings like these:

• Introduction  
• Explain the author’s main point  
• Show why this main point doesn’t hold up when we consider this other example  
• Explain the implications of what I’ve shown for our understanding of the author  
• Show how that changes our understanding of the topic

For longer papers, you may decide to include subheadings to guide your reader through your argument. In those cases, you would need to revise your informal subheadings to be more useful for your readers. For example, if you have initially written in something like “explain the author’s main point,” your final subheading might be something like “Sandel’s main argument” or “Sandel’s opposition to genetic enhancement.” In other cases, once you have the key pieces of your argument in place, you will be able to remove the subheadings.  

Strategy #3: Create a reverse outline from your draft  

While you may have learned to outline a paper before writing a draft, this step is often difficult because our ideas develop as we write. In some cases, it can be more helpful to write a draft in which you get all of your ideas out and then do a “reverse outline” of what you’ve already written. This doesn’t have to be formal; you can just make a list of the point in each paragraph of your draft and then ask these questions:

• Are those points in an order that makes sense to you?  
• Are there gaps in your argument?  
• Do the topic sentences of the paragraphs clearly state these main points?  
• Do you have more than one paragraph that focuses on the same point? If so, do you need both paragraphs?  
• Do you have some paragraphs that include too many points? If so, would it make more sense to split them up?  
• Do you make points near the end of the draft that would be more effective earlier in your paper?  
• Are there points missing from this draft?  
• picture_as_pdf Tips for Organizing Your Essay

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II. Getting Started

2.4 Prewriting

Kathryn Crowther; Lauren Curtright; Nancy Gilbert; Barbara Hall; Tracienne Ravita; Kirk Swenson; and Terri Pantuso

Loosely defined, prewriting includes all the writing strategies employed before writing your first draft. Although many more prewriting strategies exist, the following section covers using experience and observations, reading, freewriting, asking questions, listing, and clustering/idea mapping. Using the strategies in the following section can help you overcome the fear of the blank page and confidently begin the writing process.

Choosing a Topic

In addition to understanding that writing is a process , writers also understand that choosing a good general topic for an assignment is an essential first step. Sometimes your instructor will give you an idea to begin an assignment, and other times your instructor will ask you to come up with a topic on your own. A good topic not only covers what an assignment will be about, but it also fits the assignment’s purpose and its audience .

In the next few sections, you will follow a writer named Mariah as she explores and develops her essay’s topic and focus. You will also be planning one of your own. The first important step is for you to tell yourself why you are writing (to inform, to explain, or some other purpose) and for whom you are writing. Write your purpose and your audience on your own sheet of paper, and keep the paper close by as you read and write the first draft.

Experience and Observations

When selecting a topic, you may want to consider something that interests you or something based on your own life and personal experiences. Even everyday observations can lead to interesting topics. After writers think about their experiences and observations, they often take notes on paper to better develop their thoughts. These notes help writers discover what they have to say about their topic.

Reading plays a vital role in all the stages of the writing process, but it first figures in the development of ideas and topics. Different kinds of documents can help you choose and develop a topic. For example, a magazine cover advertising the latest research on the threat of global warming may catch your eye in the supermarket. This subject may interest you, and you may consider global warming as a topic. Or maybe a novel’s courtroom drama sparks your curiosity of a particular lawsuit or legal controversy.

After you choose a topic, critical reading is essential to the development of a topic. While reading almost any document, you evaluate the author’s point of view by thinking about his main idea and his support. When you judge the author’s argument, you discover more about not only the author’s opinion but also your own. If this step already seems daunting , remember that even the best writers need to use prewriting strategies to generate ideas.

Prewriting strategies depend on your critical reading skills. Reading, prewriting and brainstorming exercises (and outlines and drafts later in the writing process) will further develop your topic and ideas. As you continue to follow the writing process, you will see how Mariah uses critical reading skills to assess her own prewriting exercises.

Brainstorming

Brainstorming refers to writing techniques used to:

• Generate topic ideas
• Transfer your abstract thoughts on a topic into more concrete ideas on paper (or digitally on a computer screen)
• Organize the ideas you have generated to discover a focus and develop a working thesis

Although brainstorming techniques can be helpful in all stages of the writing process, you will have to find the techniques that are most effective for your writing needs. The following general strategies can be used when initially deciding on a topic, or for narrowing the focus for a topic: freewriting , a sking questions , listing , and clustering/idea mapping .

In the initial stage of the writing process, it is fine if you choose a general topic. Later you can use brainstorming strategies to narrow the focus of the topic.

Freewriting

Freewriting is an exercise in which you write freely about any topic for a set amount of time (usually five to seven minutes). During the time limit, you may jot down any thoughts that come to your mind. Try not to worry about grammar, spelling, or punctuation. Instead, write as quickly as you can without stopping. If you get stuck, just copy the same word or phrase over and over again until you come up with a new thought.

Writing often comes easier when you have a personal connection with the topic you have chosen. Remember, to generate ideas in your freewriting, you may also think about readings that you have enjoyed or that have challenged your thinking. Doing this may lead your thoughts in interesting directions.

Quickly recording your thoughts on paper will help you discover what you have to say about a topic. When writing quickly, try not to doubt or question your ideas. Allow yourself to write freely and unselfconsciously. Once you start writing with few limitations, you may find you have more to say than you first realized. Your flow of thoughts can lead you to discover even more ideas about the topic. Freewriting may even lead you to discover another topic that excites you even more.

Look at Mariah’s example below. The instructor allowed the members of the class to choose their own topics, and Mariah thought about her experiences as a communications major. She used this freewriting exercise to help her generate more concrete ideas from her own experience.

Freewriting Example

Last semester my favorite class was about mass media. We got to study radio and television. People say we watch too much television, and even though I try not to, I end up watching a few reality shows just to relax. Everyone has to relax! It’s too hard to relax when something like the news (my husband watches all the time) is on because it’s too scary now. Too much bad news, not enough good news. News. Newspapers I don’t read as much anymore. I can get the headlines on my homepage when I check my email. Email could be considered mass media too these days. I used to go to the video store a few times a week before I started school, but now the only way I know what movies are current is to listen for the Oscar nominations. We have cable but we can’t afford movie channels, so I sometimes look at older movies late at night. UGH. A few of them get played again and again until you’re sick of them. My husband thinks I’m crazy, but sometimes there are old black-and-whites on from the 1930s and ‘40s. I could never live my life in black-and-white. I like the home decorating shows and love how people use color on their walls. Makes rooms look so bright. When we buy a home, if we ever can, I’ll use lots of color. Some of those shows even show you how to do major renovations by yourself. Knock down walls and everything. Not for me–or my husband. I’m handier than he is. I wonder if they could make a reality show about us?

Asking Questions

Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?

In everyday situations, you pose these kinds of questions to get more information. Who will be my partner for the project? When is the next meeting? Why is my car making that odd noise? When faced with a writing assignment, you might ask yourself, “How do I begin?”

You seek the answers to these questions to gain knowledge, to better understand your daily experiences, and to plan for the future. Asking these types of questions will also help you with the writing process. As you choose your topic, answering these questions can help you revisit the ideas you already have and generate new ways to think about your topic. You may also discover aspects of the topic that are unfamiliar to you and that you would like to learn more about. All these idea-gathering techniques will help you plan for future work on your assignment.

When Mariah reread her freewriting notes, she found she had rambled and her thoughts were disjointed. She realized that the topic that interested her most was the one she started with, the media. She then decided to explore that topic by asking herself questions about it. Her purpose was to refine media into a topic she felt comfortable writing about. To see how asking questions can help you choose a topic, take a look at the following chart that Mariah completed to record her questions and answers. She asked herself the questions that reporters and journalists use to gather information for their stories. The questions are often called the 5WH questions, after their initial letters.

Asking Questions Example

Narrowing the Focus

After rereading her essay assignment, Mariah realized her general topic, mass media, is too broad for her class’s short paper requirement. Three pages are not enough to cover all the concerns in mass media today. Mariah also realized that although her readers are other communications majors who are interested in the topic, they might want to read a paper about a particular issue in mass media.

The prewriting techniques of brainstorming by freewriting and asking questions helped Mariah think more about her topic, but the following prewriting strategies can help her (and you) narrow the focus of the topic:

• Clustering/Idea Mapping

Narrowing the focus means breaking up the topic into subtopics, or more specific points. Generating lots of subtopics will help you eventually select the ones that fit the assignment and appeal to you and your audience.

Listing is a term often applied to describe any prewriting technique writers use to generate ideas on a topic, including freewriting and asking questions. You can make a list on your own or in a group with your classmates. Start with a blank sheet of paper (or a blank computer screen) and write your general topic across the top. Underneath your topic, make a list of more specific ideas. Think of your general topic as a broad category and the list items as things that fit in that category. Often you will find that one item can lead to the next, creating a flow of ideas that can help you narrow your focus to a more specific paper topic. The following is Mariah’s brainstorming list.

Mariah’s Brainstorming List

• Broadcasting
• Radio Television
• Gaming/Video Games
• Internet Cell Phones
• Smart Phones
• Text Messages
• Tiny Cameras

From this list, Mariah could narrow her focus to a particular technology under the broad category of “mass media.”

Idea Mapping

Idea mapping, sometimes called clustering or webbing, allows you to visualize your ideas on paper using circles, lines, and arrows. This technique is also known as clustering because ideas are broken down and clustered, or grouped, together. Many writers like this method because the shapes show how the ideas relate or connect, and writers can find a focused topic from the connections mapped. Using idea mapping, you might discover interesting connections between topics that you had not thought of before.

To create an idea map:

• Start by writing your general topic in a circle in the center of a blank sheet of paper. Moving out from the main circle, write down as many concepts and terms ideas you can think of related to your general topic in blank areas of the page. Jot down your ideas quickly–do not overthink your responses. Try to fill the page.
• Once you’ve filled the page, circle the concepts and terms that are relevant to your topic. Use lines or arrows to categorize and connect closely related ideas. Add and cluster as many ideas as you can think of.

To continue brainstorming, Mariah tried idea mapping. Review Mariah’s idea map in Figure 2.4.1. [1]

Mariah’s Idea Map

Notice Mariah’s largest circle contains her general topic, mass media. Then, the general topic branches into two subtopics written in two smaller circles: television and radio. The subtopic television branches into even more specific topics: cable and DVDs. From there, Mariah drew more circles and wrote more specific ideas: high definition and digital recording from cable and Blu-ray from DVDs. The radio topic led Mariah to draw connections between music, downloads versus CDs, and, finally, piracy. From this idea map, Mariah saw she could consider narrowing the focus of her mass media topic to the more specific topic of music piracy.

Topic Checklist: Developing a Good Topic

• Am I interested in this topic?
• Would my audience be interested?
• Do I have prior knowledge or experience with this topic? If so, would I be comfortable exploring this topic and sharing my experience?
• Do I want to learn more about this topic?
• Is this topic specific?
• Does it fit the length of the assignment?

Prewriting strategies are a vital first step in the writing process. First, they help you choose a broad topic, and then they help you narrow the focus of the topic to a more specific idea. An effective topic ensures that you are ready for the next step: Developing a working thesis and planning the organization of your essay by creating an outline.

Purpose of an Outline

Once your topic has been chosen, your ideas have been generated through brainstorming techniques, and you’ve developed a working thesis, the next step in the prewriting stage might be to create an outline. Sometimes called a “blueprint,” or “plan” for your paper, an outline helps writers organize their thoughts and categorize the main points they wish to make in an order that makes sense.

The purpose of an outline is to help you organize your paper by checking to see if and how your ideas connect to each other, or whether you need to flesh out a point or two. No matter the length of the paper, from a three-page weekly assignment to a 50-page senior thesis , outlines can help you see the overall picture. Having an outline also helps prevent writers from “getting stuck” when writing the first draft of an essay.

A well-developed outline will show the essential elements of an essay:

• thesis of essay
• main idea of each body paragraph
• evidence/support offered in each paragraph to substantiate the main points

A well-developed outline breaks down the parts of your thesis in a clear, hierarchical manner. Writing an outline before beginning an essay helps the writer organize ideas generated through brainstorming and/or research. In short, a well-developed outline makes your paper easier to write.

The formatting of any outline is not arbitrary ; the system of formatting and number/letter designations creates a visual hierarchy of the ideas, or points, being made in the essay. Major points, in other words, should not be buried in subtopic levels.

Outlines can also be used for revision , oftentimes referred to as backwards, or reverse, outlines. When using an outline for revision purposes, you can identify issues with organization or even find new directions in which to take your essay.

Creating an Outline

• Identify your topic. Put the topic in your own words with a single sentence or phrase to help you stay on topic.
• Determine your main points. What are the main points you want to make to convince your audience? Refer back to the prewriting/brainstorming exercise of answering 5WH questions: “why or how is the main topic important?” Using your brainstorming notes, you should be able to create a working thesis .
• List your main points/ideas in a logical order. You can always change the order later as you evaluate your outline.
• Create sub-points for each major idea. Typically, each time you have a new number or letter, there needs to be at least two points (i.e. if you have an A, you need a B; if you have a 1, you need a 2; etc.). Though perhaps frustrating at first, it is indeed useful because it forces you to think hard about each point. If you can’t create two points, then reconsider including the first in your paper, as it may be extraneous information that may detract from your argument.
• Evaluate. Review your organizational plan, your blueprint for your paper. Does each paragraph have a controlling idea/topic sentence? Is each point adequately supported? Look over what you have written. Does it make logical sense? Is each point suitably fleshed out? Is there anything included that is unnecessary?

Sample Outline

Thesis: Moving college courses to an asynchronous online environment is an effective way of preventing the spread of COVID-19 and offers more students the opportunity to participate.

• Students don’t have to be on-campus, avoiding high-contact living situations
• Students don’t have to travel, avoiding buses and other high-contact travel environments
• Students don’t have to sit in lecture halls, avoiding extended indoor exposure
• Students complete group work via chat rooms or online platforms.
• Students don’t have to touch shared seating, doors, etc.
• Students don’t have to share lab equipment or other materials
• This affords students the ability to complete coursework around a job schedule.
• This format is often family-friendly for those who have children or other familial responsibilities.
• Students may be at high risk or have family members who are high risk
• The reduced exposure of an online environment allows these students to participate without increasing their risk

This section contains material from:

Crowther, Kathryn, Lauren Curtright, Nancy Gilbert, Barbara Hall, Tracienne Ravita, and Kirk Swenson. Successful College Composition . 2nd edition. Book 8. Georgia: English Open Textbooks, 2016. http://oer.galileo.usg.edu/english-textbooks/8 . Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License .

• “Mariah’s Idea Map” was derived by Brandi Gomez from an image in: Kathryn Crowther et al, Successful College Composition, 2nd ed. Book 8. (Georgia: English Open Textbooks, 2016),   http://oer.galileo.usg.edu/english-textbooks/8 . Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License . ↵

The method or operation by which something is done or accomplished; a series of continuous actions that result in the achievement of a goal. The writing process refers to the sequence of steps that result in an essay, research paper, or other piece of writing.

The person or group of people who view and analyze the work of a writer, researcher, or other content creator.

Necessary or critical for existence; indispensable or integral.

Intimidating, threatening, or fear-inducing.

To present or put forward an idea.

A statement, usually one sentence, that summarizes an argument that will later be explained, expanded upon, and developed in a longer essay or research paper. In undergraduate writing, a thesis statement is often found in the introductory paragraph of an essay. The plural of thesis is theses .

A lengthy research paper written as part of a graduation requirement for someone who is close to completing their undergraduate requirements for their major and is in their final year of undergraduate study. Like a master’s thesis or a doctoral dissertation, a senior thesis is written to demonstrate mastery over specific subject matter.

The essence of something; those things that compose the foundational elements of a thing; the basics.

Justify, affirm, or corroborate; to show evidence of; to back up a statement, idea, or argument.

A system involving rank. Hierarchical refers to a system that involves a hierarchy. For example, the military is a hierarchical system in which some people outrank others.

To be subject to the judgment of a whim, chance, or personal preference; the opposite of a standardized law, regulation, or rule.

An altered version of  a written work. Revising means to rewrite in order to improve and make corrections. Unlike editing, which involves minor changes, revisions include major and noticeable changes to a written work.

Irrelevant, unneeded, or unnecessary.

Occurring at a different time; not occurring at the same time; asynchronous learning refers to work that can be done by a student independently without real-time interaction or guidance from an instructor.

2.4 Prewriting Copyright © 2022 by Kathryn Crowther; Lauren Curtright; Nancy Gilbert; Barbara Hall; Tracienne Ravita; Kirk Swenson; and Terri Pantuso is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.