WRITING IS THINKING

Once you become a confident writer, you will discover interesting things happening – you will find that the act of writing helps you to discover ideas, sharpen reactions and refine your thinking, because the act of writing is a discovery process.

Writing is a series of stages that gets your mental wheels spinning, so you can explore ideas, test relationships and develop your thinking. In short, writing is thinking.

I. Prewriting

Choosing a topic;

Shaping a topic;

Freewriting

To free write for ideas write down anything and everything that occurs to you about the topic without evaluating the worth of the ideas. You can shift directions abruptly to pursue a new idea that suddenly strikes you, or you can pursue a single idea as far as you can take it. You can experiment and play with words. Just be relaxed and go with your flow of thoughts. Do not stop writing. Remember: the emphasis in freewriting is on free, so do not be concerned with grammar, spelling, logic or neatness.

List writing

List writing works like this: in a column list every idea that occurs to you about your topic. As with freewriting do not stop to decide, whether you like these ideas or whether they will “work” in your essay. When you run out of ideas, review your list. Now you can evaluate if each idea is suitable for your essay. Cross out irrelevant ideas. Next, study the first idea in your list, think about it and add some relevant details.

Clustering

Write your topic in the center of the page and circle it:

Next let your thoughts flow freely and record all the ideas that occur to you, circling and connecting the ideas as appropriate. If you run out of ideas, study the branches of your clusters to see relationships among ideas. These relationships may suggest new ideas.

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 1396