Prewriting refers to the process of coming up with and organizing ideas for a piece of writing. But how should you approach prewriting? In this post, we explain five helpful strategies you can use to prepare for a writing project.
Brainstorming might be the simplest prewriting technique around! It involves noting down every idea you have—good or bad—until you find one that inspires you.
The key here is to avoid being self-critical! All you need to do at this stage is jot down everything you think of related to your goals or the subject of your writing, no matter how basic or poorly articulated those ideas might seem at first.
Once you have a long list of words and phrases, you can start sorting through them, picking the most interesting or relevant ones to explore further. You can also try combining different ideas to come up with something new.
Freewriting, like brainstorming, encourages you to let ideas flow. But rather than just noting words and phrases, you’ll be writing in complete sentences and paragraphs.
This might involve starting with a single thought and pushing it as far as it will go during your freewriting session. Or it might involve coming up with lots of different ideas and jumping between them. The key, in either case, is to not stop writing.
Make a spelling mistake? Just leave it. Come up with an idea that immediately seems terrible? Just move on and keep writing. Come up with an idea that seems really promising? Excellent! But don’t stop! You can review anything you write once you’re done, but for now, you should focus on generating new ideas.
The best way to freewrite, then, is usually to set a time limit, then sit down and type for the whole time. Once your time is up, you can go back over what you’ve written, pick out the best ideas, and start planning how to write them up.
Looping is a version of freewriting that works as follows:
The goal is to pinpoint and expand on your best idea during each loop. And once you’ve fully refined your basic concept, you can start the writing process proper.
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Concept mapping, also known as clustering, mind mapping, or idea mapping, is a strategy that allows you to visually explore the relationships between ideas.
To create a concept map, you can:
You can also draw lines connecting the secondary and tertiary bubbles. This will let you visualize the different ways in which your main topic could develop, or different connections between various concepts, helping you to plan your writing project.
Finally, outlining is a prewriting strategy that is useful for organizing the ideas you’ve generated. This will help you plan the structure of your writing project.
To create an outline for a piece of writing, you can:
Doing this will give you a clear structure to work with when you start writing. It is therefore especially helpful when planning longer writing projects, but it can be useful whenever you need to be sure a document has an easy-to-follow structure.
As you can see, there are a variety of prewriting strategies available to you. Their effectiveness can vary depending on the type of writer that you are, so it’s important to try a few to find what works best for you!
We hope these tips help you feel more confident with beginning the writing process. And once you have something drafted, we have expert editors on hand 24/7 to help you with proofreading.
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