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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. Journals are safe spaces to record your experience of the...
Freewriting is just what it says—writing freely, whatever comes into your mind, without caring about spelling, punctuation, etc. It’s a way to free up your thoughts, help you know where your interests lie, and...
Brainstorming is like freewriting around a specific topic. It helps you bring your subconscious thoughts into consciousness, identifying as many ideas as possible that are related to a particular topic. To brainstorm, let your...
Mapping or diagramming helps you immediately group and see relationships among ideas. Mapping and diagramming may help you create information on a topic, and/or organize information from a list or freewriting entries, as a...
Making a list can help you develop ideas for writing once you have a particular focus. If you want to take a stand on a subject, you might list the top ten reasons why...
If you have a broad topic you want to write about, but don’t quite know how to narrow it, ask defining questions to help you develop your main idea for writing. Once you have...
Now that you have seen how some prewriting techniques can help you get your ideas going as you begin your writing process, it’s time to see how our sample student applies some of these...
If you have never tried out some of these prewriting strategies, it’s a good idea to give them a try, especially if you have writer’s block or feel your current prewriting strategies don’t work...
Sometimes, it’s difficult to decide how much to explain or how much detail to go into in a paper when considering your audience. Remember that you need to explain the major concepts in your...
Because keeping your audience in mind as you engage in the writing process is important, it may be helpful to have a list of questions in mind as you think about your audience. The...