WRITING ESSAYS

PRE-WRITING

Where does writing begin? Where do writers find within themselves the energy and desire to generate words, to compose sentences, and to build paragraphs? How do essays originate?

To these questions we have no simple answer. But since writing originates somewhere in the mind, your first task is to find a way into your mind and then out again so that you can bring back the news locked up inside you, waiting to be broadcast and published. Pre-writing, then, is the process of discovering your own ideas.
To help you discover them, we offer a variety of suggestions. If any one of them leads you to a promising idea for an essay, you may not need all of the others, and you certainly don’t need to take them all in order. Feel free to experiment with different methods of getting started, and jump ahead to any method that you think will help you.

- Branching
- Choosing a Topic
- Making an Assigned Topic Your Own
- Narrowing the Topic
- Triple-Viewing the Topic: Particle, Wave, and Field
- Dramatizing the Topic with Questions
- Choosing a Basic Question to Define a Problem or Conflict
- Getting Reactions to Your Question
- Using Analogies
- Working with a Nugget
- Active Reading