Writing an Essay

When writing about a new topic there are a few tools that you may use to help better your writing style, and to help aid with the potential of writer's block. Brainstorming is the first tool that should be utilized in the writing process. Brainstorming involves writing down as many ideas as you can about your subject, usually in short phrases, questions, or single words. I plan on using this technique to help me formulate ideas to write about.

Another tool that is very handy when choosing your plan of attack is called clustering. Clustering involves choosing a key word or phrase, or even a short sentence, and placing it in the center of a blank page with a circle around it. Next, you try to think of ideas, words, or other short phrases that you can associate or relate to your key word or phrase. I plan on implementing this process into my subject writing by using the brainstormed ideas as the initial bubbles around the outside of the center circle. Then I will move outwards from each of those bubbles to choose one, two, or even three options past those. Such as questions, yes or no's, for or against the idea, and other multiple opposites of the secondary bubbles.

Free writing involves writing freely, and without stopping, whatever thoughts and ideas you have about your subject, without worrying about sentence structure, spelling, or grammar. This will most likely be the best way for me to talk about my subject. For me, my best thoughts come out as I type or say them. The ideas I have seem to formulate into something that resembles some kind of sense, but usually only to me in the initial stage of free writing. After that, I can come back and refine my writing by doing the grammar checks, and by basically just going through and making sense of the more than likely unintelligible nonsense that I will write to begin with during the free writing section of the creation process.

There's another great strategy for generating ideas, and that is to make a list of questions you have about your subject. With this technique I like to think of questions that I have on the subject that I either know or don't know about and want to know more about and need to cement my knowledge of the topic. This is a great way to learn about your topic, and every time I want to learn about a subject I use this methodology to gain a knowledgeable grasp of the topic at hand. When writing about a new topic in which the author doesn't know much about the topic it is imperative of the writer to use at least a couple of these techniques.