Starting an academic essay is a challenge for students. Even if you have a clear idea and a lot of information, you may still struggle without knowing how to put great writing ideas on paper. Where to start? It’s one of the most common questions. Your main issue is how to get to the first draft and decide what comes in between a final paper and a blank page. You should elaborate your thoughts into a coherent essay. Start with planning and search for powerful prewriting strategies that will help you achieve this goal and submit a perfect draft.
What are prewriting strategies?
They use writing to clarify and generate interesting ideas. Although some students prefer to create an outline before they start completing their assignments, there are other effective prewriting strategies that you should use to develop and organize your thoughts. How can they help you? Consider them to:
- Organize all ideas before writing the first draft,
- Find a good direction for your assignment,
- Think about new ideas.
There are certain things that you should clear out before you start writing your paper:
- Its purpose and topic,
- If you need to analyze, entertain, persuade, or do other things,
- Your target audience.
What are top powerful methods?
Some of the most popular prewriting strategies include the following:
- Clustering,
- Brainstorming,
- Looping,
- Freewriting,
- Asking basic questions,
- Conducting preliminary research.
Brainstorming
It’s a great technique where you write down all the ideas that come to your mind if it relates to a particular topic. How should you use it? Follow these simple guidelines:
- Choose a space with good lighting and be comfortable in a pleasant environment,
- Create a list of interesting ideas and capture them quickly (don’t worry about writing complete sentences at this stage),
- Eliminate possible distractions to keep your focus,
- Brainstorm while reading to capture emotional reactions or commentaries,
- Brainstorm during conversations with other people.
What makes brainstorming so powerful? You need this prewriting technique because it makes it easier to pick an original topic and finding its supporting examples or evidence.
Clustering
It’s a prewriting strategy where you map out all thoughts using special lines and circles to display their different branches. How will it help you? Clustering shows how many ideas can connect to a central one to let you prioritize and organize them before using anything in your writing. Use these helpful hints to succeed:
- Draw one circle and put a central thought in its middle,
- Draw a line, create another circle, and use the idea that relates back to the central one,
- Continue this process.
What do you need to find out? Decide how all of your ideas connect, come up with new additions, and determine fresh aspects of your overall topic by using this technique.
Freewriting
It’s a helpful method that asks students to write without a break for a few minutes to let their ideas flow. There are some hints that will help you. Keep in mind that:
- Punctuation, grammar, and styling don’t matter at this stage of the writing process,
- This technique focuses on putting down all of your thoughts on paper fast,
- While freewriting, don’t use complete paragraphs or sentences,
- Think more about a given subject and develop original ideas.
Conducting your preliminary research
After choosing a general topic, consider broad search terms, and use them to gather and refine new ideas. Use available sources to limit your focus. Take these basic steps:
- Determine your focus and use very specific search terms,
- Take advantage of available library databases,
- Look for keywords and their synonyms,
- Take notes of all important findings.
Looping
It’s a great prewriting strategy that enables you to focus your thoughts on discovering a perfect topic for your piece of writing. Loop one freewriting session after another. Avoid stopping and editing your ideas. After finishing a sequence of sessions, look for interesting sentences, phrases, thoughts, or topics and circle them to end up with something specific. You’ll get a basis for a strong thesis.
Asking basic questions
There are some basic questions that students ask when completing their assignments, and you should use them to explore your topic. Make them flexible to account for specific details.
- Who? Decide who are important participants, primary or secondary actors, or who is affected to start drafting your academic paper with no delay.
- What? Determine a particular topic and its importance, potential issues, or a basic problem that you will cover in your next assignment.
- Where? Find out where a certain issue or problem has its source, where the activity takes place, and where its cause or effect is visible.
- When? Learn when a problem is most apparent, when it developed or when it will culminate, and what historical or other forces shaped it.
- Why? Understand why your chosen issue arose, why it’s your problem at all, and why it developed in a specific manner.
- How? Decide how it is important for everyone, how you can address or resolve it successfully, and how it affects participants.
Answering these questions is a great way to gather a lot of information about your topic fast, but it takes some practice. Ask them to clarify major points in prewriting.
Final words
Use these prewriting techniques if you struggle to start a rough draft and keep all of your interesting ideas at hand. What if you need extra help? In this case, turn to online professionals and get their expert assistance to make things easier and relieve your academic stress. They know how to help you in many ways. Entrust your assignments to qualified and reputable specialists and benefit from their affordable services.
