Prewriting

Mind Mapping

Example 1: Texas Wind Energy

Example 2: Texas Wind Energy: Airborne Wind Investment

Mind Mapping Tools

from UNC-Chapel Hill Writing Center: Brainstorming

Brainstorming Techniques

Brainstorming can help you choose a topic, develop an approach to a topic, or deepen your understanding of the topic’s potential.

 Try out several of these options and challenge yourself to vary the techniques you rely on; some techniques might suit a particular writer, academic discipline, or assignment better than others. If the technique you try first doesn’t seem to help you, move right along and try some others.

Freewriting

When you freewrite, you let your thoughts flow as they will, putting pen to paper and writing down whatever comes into your mind. You don’t judge the quality of what you write and you don’t worry about style or any surface-level issues, like spelling, grammar, or punctuation. If you can’t think of what to say, you write that down—really. The advantage of this technique is that you free up your internal critic and allow yourself to write things you might not write if you were being too self-conscious.

Break Down the Topic into Levels

Once you have a course assignment in front of you, you might brainstorm:

• the general topic, like “The relationship between tropical fruits and colonial powers”

• a specific subtopic or required question, like “How did the availability of multiple tropical fruits influence competition amongst colonial powers trading from the larger Caribbean islands during the 19th century?”

• a single term or phrase that you sense you’re overusing in the paper. For example: If you see that you’ve written “increased the competition” about a dozen times in your “tropical fruits” paper, you could brainstorm variations on the phrase itself or on each of the main terms: “increased” and “competition.”

Listing/Bulleting

In this technique, you jot down lists of words or phrases under a particular topic. You can base your list on:

• the general topic

• one or more words from your particular thesis claim

• a word or idea that is the complete opposite of your original word or idea.

Three perspectives

Looking at something from different perspectives helps you see it more completely—or at least in a completely different way.

To use this strategy, answer the questions for each of the three perspectives, then look for interesting relationships or mismatches you can explore:

1. Describe it: Describe your subject in detail. What is your topic? What are its components? What are its interesting and distinguishing features? What are its puzzles? Distinguish your subject from those that are similar to it. How is your subject unlike others?

2. Trace it: What is the history of your subject? How has it changed over time? Why? What are the significant events that have influenced your subject?

3. Map it: What is your subject related to? What is it influenced by? How? What does it influence? How? Who has a stake in your topic? Why? What fields do you draw on for the study of your subject? Why? How has your subject been approached by others? How is their work related to yours?

Cubing

Cubing enables you to consider your topic from six different directions; your cubing brainstorming will result in six “sides” or approaches to the topic. 

Take a sheet of paper, consider your topic, and respond to these six commands:

1. Describe it. 2. Compare it. 3. Associate it. 4. Analyze it. 5. Apply it. 6. Argue for and against it.

Look over what you’ve written. Do any of the responses suggest anything new about your topic? What interactions do you notice among the “sides”? That is, do you see patterns repeating, or a theme emerging that you could use to approach the topic or draft a thesis? Does one side seem particularly fruitful in getting your brain moving? Could that one side help you draft your thesis statement? Use this technique in a way that serves your topic. It should, at least, give you a broader awareness of the topic’s complexities, if not a sharper focus on what you will do with it.

Similes

In this technique, complete the following sentence: ____________________ is/was/are/were like _____________________.

In the first blank put one of the terms or concepts your paper centers on. Then try to brainstorm as many answers as possible for the second blank, writing them down as you come up with them. After you have produced a list of options, look over your ideas. What kinds of ideas come forward? What patterns or associations do you find?

Clustering/mapping/webbing:

This technique has three (or more) different names, according to how you describe the activity itself or what the end product looks like. In short, you will write a lot of different terms and phrases onto a sheet of paper in a random fashion and later go back to link the words together into a sort of “map” or “web” that forms groups from the separate parts. Allow yourself to start with chaos. After the chaos subsides, you will be able to create some order out of it.

Relationship between the parts

In this technique, begin by writing the following pairs of terms on opposite margins of one sheet of paper:

Whole

Parts --> Parts of Parts

Parts --> Parts of Parts

Parts --> Parts of Parts

Looking over these four groups of pairs, start to fill in your ideas below each heading. Keep going down through as many levels as you can. Now, look at the various parts that comprise the parts of your whole concept. What sorts of conclusions can you draw according to the patterns, or lack of patterns, that you see? 

Using Charts or Shapes

If you are more visually inclined, you might create charts, graphs, or tables in lieu of word lists or phrases as you try to shape or explore an idea. You could use the same phrases or words that are central to your topic and try different ways to arrange them spatially, say in a graph, on a grid, or in a table or chart. You might even try the trusty old flow chart. The important thing here is to get out of the realm of words alone and see how different spatial representations might help you see the relationships among your ideas. If you can’t imagine the shape of a chart at first, just put down the words on the page and then draw lines between or around them. Or think of a shape. Do your ideas most easily form a triangle? square? umbrella? Can you put some ideas in parallel formation? In a line?

from UNC-Chapel Hill Writing Center: Brainstorming