3.2: Writing as Thinking- the Value of Planning Writing

Although it may be tempting, it is a bad idea to just sit down at your keyboard and start banging out an essay. Until your thoughts have some type of organization and focus, it’s too easy for your paper to wander, add in unnecessary information, or never say what you want it to say. Before you ever begin to write your actual essay, you’ll need to find a way of gathering and sifting your ideas. Writing instructors call this process “prewriting.”

The first stage of this process is brainstorming. At this point, don’t worry about having good ideas: instead, try to generate as many ideas as you can. There will be plenty of time later to discard the ones you think are not necessary or helpful to your project. You will probably find that some of the techniques in this section do not work for you, but others may surprise you and become trusted friends whenever a wild writing assignment approaches. Here are some popular techniques for getting started:

Freewriting

Another name for this technique is “What I Really Mean Is” or WIRMI. To freewrite, simply start putting words onto paper. If a topic has been assigned to you, give yourself a set time, say 5 or 10 minutes, begin writing down everything you can think of that is related—even distantly—to that topic, and do not stop writing or typing until the time has expired. It doesn’t matter if your words even make sense at this point: the goal is just to write. What you may discover is that your subconscious mind begins to direct your words. Soon, a clear idea of what you know and what you want to communicate to an audience may appear, and at that point you’re finished freewriting and ready to start a more formal gathering of your main points.

The following is any example of freewriting over the essay over Chase’s assignment:

This was a new topic to me because I am someone who has generally seen myself included in the stories I read as a kid, and I saw on television. One example I can think of is Batman—I think I identified with him because he lost his parents at a young age, and I also lost my dad at a young age. However, now in reading “The Danger of a Single Story,” I see how many people are left out of the stories that we tell in American culture. Even though Batman was a rich orphan and I was a poor kid in Kansas, I still identified with him because we shared small similarities, but also because I looked like him—I was a white male too. I think it is good for me to think about these other perspectives because I haven’t really had the experience of not seeing someone I identify with in the stories I read. This helps me see why the diversity of voices in the stories we tell, like having female movie directors and writers of color, is important so that all people can see themselves in our culture’s stories.

Listing

This method is slightly more directed than freewriting. For this type of brainstorming, you start listing everything you know about your topic. At first, your list will probably contain a lot of items that seem barely connected. Once you have a page covered with as many listed items as you can generate, however, you can look them over and begin to find elements they have in common. Some will appear more important, or easier to write about, than others. Some will cover broader areas and may be suited to becoming topic sentences or larger chunks of your paper. Others will fall under these broader areas and serve as examples or details that help explain the larger ideas.

Here’s an example of listing based on "The Danger of a Single Story" by Chimamanda Adiche:

1. Adichie grew up in Africa but read books about British and American children.
2. She wrote stories that mirrored what she saw in the books, not what she saw around her, showing how easily influenced children are by stories.
3. This shows how identity is influenced by the media we consume.
4. She also saw the effects of a single story when she came to school in the US, and people were confused that she spoke English since she was from Africa.
5. Adichie explains how single stories turn into stereotypes
6. She also says that power dictates which single story is told and how multiple stories can solve the problems cause by the single story.
7. So these "single stories" are not really an accident-- they have some type of motivation behind them.
8. This makes me think about social media and the way that certain stories are pushed by certain political groups and media outlets.
9. It is interesting that the way to counter these single stories is to share stories-- maybe this is where my conclusion can go? Something about the power of communication and storytelling and maybe even learning in the humanities?

Now that a list exists, you could look at it and notice that some items share commonalities. We see that numbers 3, 8, and 9 are all related to media for example. Numbers 2 and 5 describe effects of this phenomena. Once you’ve noticed these groupings, you could imagine their contents as the basis for individual sections or paragraphs for your paper.

See this video for help drawing relationships between your ideas as you list and brainstorm.

Clustering or Mind-mapping

Some people prefer a less linear method of generating ideas, and for those people, a mind-map, or cluster, is a great method. To do this, imagine a main, central, or somehow dominating characteristic of your topic. Write a word that describes that in the center circle. Then imagine other words or ideas that seem related to that main idea in some way and write those in the surrounding circles. Once you’ve filled in most of the circles, you begin to see how the various ideas connect, suggesting a possible organization for the paper you plan to write. We’ve included a basic template for a mind-map here, but you can find many more elaborate examples online.

Here’s an example of a mindmap (please note this has been created on a small scale to save space):

See this video for a more in-depth explanation of visual pre-writing strategies from the Writing Center at UNC Chapel Hill.

Questioning

When you aren’t yet sure how to approach an assignment, it may be helpful to begin by asking questions about the subject. Although you almost certainly don’t yet have the answers to any of your questions, being able to write them out is likely to help you see a direction for your paper and begin any necessary research that will find those answers.

Here’s a sample question list for “The Danger of a Single Story”:

1. Why does Adiche only have access to European books?
2. Why does Adiche go to America for college?
3. Where did Adiche's roommate's stereotypes come from?
4. How do these stereotypes impact issues like the current refugee crisis?
5. Why do societal descriptions of us so often differ from our identity?
6. Why is it so easy for us to extend one story to create a stereotype?
7. How can we reject a single story?

See this page from Thought Co. for more ideas on pre-writing with lots of linked in examples.