Prewriting Strategies

By the Writer’s Workshop at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Effective Prewriting Strategies

Brainstorming: Brainstorming can help you begin thinking about and narrowing down potential ideas and topics.

• Start by thinking about ideas, topics, terms, and/or themes that you might incorporate into your writing.
• Once you have a few key ideas, topics, terms, and/or themes, put aside any that might not be as strong or that don’t fit the assignment.
• Group the rest of the items you listed together in whatever way makes the most sense to you and give each group a label.
• These labels can then be developed into sentences that might turn into topic sentences or even a thesis statement.

You can go back and brainstorm at any point of the writing process. This activity can help you focus and connect your ideas.

Clustering/Mapping: Clustering or mapping is a great strategy for discovering how your ideas are connected.

• Begin by writing your main topic or subject in the middle of a page. As you think of ideas that connect to your main topic or subject, connect those new ideas to your main idea by drawing lines.
• Continue this process as you think of new ideas.

This process can help you come up with main ideas, identify supporting ideas, and see the connections among all of your ideas, which can help with your organization.

Freewriting: Freewriting is a great way to generate ideas without worrying about how good they are or about your writing. The goal of freewriting is to write as much as possible in a short amount of time without stopping to edit or change your writing or your ideas.

• Start by setting a timer for 5 to 10 minutes and write about the topic/idea that you want to use in your paper without stopping.
• Once you’ve written for 5 to 10 minutes, read over what you wrote and choose a few of the most interesting or strongest ideas.
• Use these few strongest and most interesting ideas to freewrite again, developing even more ideas with this narrowed focus.

Repeat this process as many times as you want until you feel you have the best ideas for your paper.

Answering Key Questions: Depending on the assignment, answering the questions Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? might help you develop a lot of ideas regarding a particular topic. Potential questions to ask include:

• Who are the participants and who is excluded?
• What is the topic and its significance?
• When is/was/will be the issue most important (in the past, present, or future)?
• Where is the issue an issue?
• Why is the issue a problem and why is it important to discuss/explore?
• How does the issue affect participants and how can the issue be addressed?

Outlining: Outlining tends to be the most linear way to prewrite and one that most writers are familiar with. In prewriting, outlining is most helpful with developing and connecting the structure and argument of your assignment. Often, in identifying the larger elements of an assignment (the thesis, main point of a paragraph, etc.) and putting them into a rough outline, it becomes easier to fill in what goes under each outlined section.

• Start your outline (whether in a digital document or handwritten on paper) by laying out your sections and subsections. A good rule of thumb is to start with a bullet/section per paragraph, and then expand from there.
• Filling in a thesis for argumentative/essay assignments (even if it’s rough or really only a placeholder) can help you better figure out the structure of your assignment. Then, for each paragraph, think about the main point of that paragraph and how it connects to your thesis/introduction. You can keep working down from there if you want, all the way to writing the ideas and even sentences you’ll want to include in that paragraph.
• Though outlines can be a little less flexible than other kinds of prewriting, don’t be too worried about everything making total and complete sense when you write it; like other kinds of prewriting, outlining is about getting stuff down so you can get to work writing, so it’s okay to just use it to jot down notes and ideas as you go.
• Outlines can be really useful when starting an assignment, but it’s also good to remember that crafting an outline at any stage in the process is likely to help you better recognize and organize your structure. It’s never too late for an outline!