Prewriting Strategies
Have you ever sat in front of your computer looking at the blinking cursor not knowing where to start your writing assignment?
Don’t worry, you’re not alone. It happens to even those who have been writing for years because, truth is, writing is hard. It’s difficult to choose the best word, material, and organization to clearly convey what you want to communicate.
Although getting all these elements right takes a lot of practice, there are certain things you can do before you start writing to make the task easier.
As the name suggests, prewriting strategies come before the writing stage to help you generate ideas, narrow down the topic, and organize the ideas and information you already have. So these can help you whether you are barely deciding the focus of your writing or if you have already conducted all the research you need.
Here are three prewriting strategies that I personally use the most and have seen help other students when they come into the Writing Center.
Mind maps or diagrams
For this strategy, write down your main topic. Then, surrounding it, write other ideas related to it, and then other ideas related to these secondary ideas, and so on. You can connect them through lines as you wish.
This approach helps you visualize the relationship between ideas and the order in which you might mention them in your writing. Doing this can also help you identify the subtopics you can develop most and which ones you need to research more.
If you prefer to do everything on your computer, Lucidchart and MindMeister are two websites you can use to create these electronically.
Freewriting
This technique consists of allowing yourself to write down everything that comes to mind regarding your topic without worrying about the quality of the ideas or the spelling.
Try to do this for 10 minutes nonstop or longer if you feel like you need to write more to get where you want to get.
Once you are done, you can go back and identify the ideas that you repeated, the ones you developed most, and the relationships your mind made between them in the instant. Some of these sentences might become the starting point when writing your essay.
Listing
In this approach, you list down all the ideas you have related to your main topic. You can even create subpoints for ideas that are directly related to each other.
Having all your information written down can help you identify ideas that have the same theme. This can help you create an outline for your essay where each theme is used as a major point in your writing and developed with the information you already have under each.
Once you’ve generated ideas using one, or all, of these prewriting strategies, you can start writing your first draft. And remember, your first draft doesn’t have to be perfect; it just has to be.