Pre-Writing Activities
Pre-writing is a writing technique designed to help you generate and refine topics to write about before you begin your essay or story. When stumped about what to write about or what to say on a particular subject, pre-writing can help clarify your ideas and bring structure to your thoughts. There are many pre-writing techniques which may be useful, depending on your writing style.
Other People Are Reading
-
Free Writing
-
Free writing is a pre-writing activity which involves writing whatever comes to your mind as it occurs. This activity draws on the belief that writing your thoughts as they happen helps subconscious ideas come to the conscious level. To try free writing, set a timer for five minutes and write whatever occurs to you, paying no attention to spelling or grammar. At the end of five minutes, read what you wrote. Ideas that are repeated throughout the free write are good topics for you to focus on.
Brainstorming
-
Brainstorming is a pre-writing technique best used when you know the general topic you want to write about but not a focused thesis. Similar to free writing, with brainstorming you free write all the ideas that you can think of related to a general topic.To try brainstorming, write your general topic at the top of a page and set a timer for five minutes. Write as many ideas as you can related to your general topic. When time is up, go over what you have written and group ideas that relate. Write one sentence which includes the ideas you grouped. This could be your topic sentence or thesis.
-
Clustering
-
Clustering is a pre-writing exercise which makes it easier to see how your ideas relate to one another by combining, recording and grouping into one activity. To create a cluster, start by writing your main idea in the center of a page and then circling it. Then write any ideas you have related to the original topic in their own circles connected to the main idea with lines. Keep building off your ideas until your page looks like a web of linking circles. Look through your clusters for ideas that intrigue you. You will also be able to identify related subtopics to your main idea.
Journaling
-
Journaling -- recording your thoughts, feelings, and reactions to the world in a notebook -- is a great source of ideas and information you can use to discover writing topics. By keeping a journal and writing in it every day about whatever interests you, you will have a recorded document of who you are and what you think. This can become the first place you go when in search of ideas that interest you. You can then apply some of the other prewriting activities to topics you find within your journal.
-
References
- Photo Credit Jupiterimages/Photos.com/Getty Images
