Prewriting is any kind of initial work that we do before starting actual paper writing. It’s not necessary to be the writing but prewriting is a focused thinking about what you are going to write your essay. There are many prewriting techniques that are going to help you write a good essay.
- Brainstorming
Brainstorming refers to quickly writing down all your thoughts as fast as they come to you. Your ideas are coming up like a storm in your head and your job is to write them down on the paper. writing your ideas is very helpful in brainstorming as it will help you to keep a record of all your ideas. It should not be a formal writing, you can use bullets to write your ideas. In this sense brainstorming is a list of ideas written on the piece of paper.
- Free writing
Free writing is very similar to brainstorming in that it gets all your thoughts out onto paper. However, where brainstorming often looks more like a list of ideas, free writing usually takes the shape of more formal sentences. Like brainstorming, you should follow the flow of your ideas, and you should not pressurize yourself about the grammar and punctuation. These things come later in the stage when you start writing your essay formally. Write all your ideas that come to your mind, do not cut or censor any idea. If you think anything useless at this stage that might be helpful later when you start writing an essay. That is why it is important to write everything that comes to your mind.
- Clustering
Once again, clustering and mind mapping, like brainstorming and free writing, allow you to take record of your ideas. However, clustering and mind mapping focus on a central word or idea, which you then work out from by associating other words, thoughts, and ideas to that central word. These may be very useful techniques for extremely visual people. A lot of online diagrams of clustering have the central word in a circle, with all the associated words in their own circles and lines connecting them back to the central word. Be as creative as you. Using these techniques allows you to very easily visualize all the ideas that are in your head.
- Question Asking
This is one of the best and most useful approaches to get yourself started on writing an essay, especially if you really have no idea where to start. Here, you write down all the questions that seem relevant to your material. These should definitely be genuine questions. By generating a lot of questions, you’ll get out a lot of the ideas, issues, thoughts, etc. that could get you started on essay writing. Similarly, a lot of great essay topics come out of a question. By focusing on a question that is not easily answered, you’ll have a framework for your argument.
- Outlining
Outlining can be extremely helpful for some writers, Outlining requires that you have a good sense of your ideas, themes, thoughts, approach, argument, etc. For outlining, most usually use bullet points to organize how they’ll structure their essay. Starts with the introduction, layout your main point from there, go through each paragraph, highlighting the main idea. Be sure to check that your ideas should be linked with each other in every paragraph. Sum up all your ideas in a conclusion paragraph stating the significance of your essay.