Lesson 5 Prompt: Pre-Writing Techniques

This post covers the two prompts that deal with pre-writing, idea-generating techniques: 

Which of the techniques for generating ideas for essays has been most valuable to you? Why? Give an example.

Which technique would you choose not to use again? Why?

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Which of the techniques for generating ideas has been the most valuable to you? Why? Give an example.

The  most valuable pre-writing task for me has been freewriting. A lot of the time I write essays as a free write, and then edit in evidence and switch paragraphs around during the revision process. Because I am fairly well-versed in writing arguments, I can free write a basic one and then edit it to make it a solid essay. The free write gets my brain working quickly for about half an hour or until I've completed the necessary number of words. Because it's technically just an idea-generating task, if it's not working the way I want the essay to work then I don't have to use anything but the ideas when I begin to work on the real essay. The freewriting for the first outline in Lesson 5 worked well for me. If I were to turn that into an essay it would need some major work, but the content is all there. I am working on Lesson 6 at the moment, and I attempted something different with my freewrite. I tried to get all the content out there, but leave all the connecting sentences and the reasoning out of it. Thus Lesson 6's freewrite is very short and choppy, but I'm finding it very easy to plug all the ideas into a simple argument formula.

Which technique would you choose not to use again?

I do not find the journalist's questions thought provoking or idea-generating at all. Perhaps it was just the topic I was using for it, which really didn't cater to that form of pre-writing, but I found it to be very tedious and I felt like I was limited by the who, what, where, why, and how questions. I used a topic that I am fairly knowledgeable with, so I wasn't prompted to do more research with the questions, especially because I asked the questions, so they were already coming from all the previous ideas I had about the topic. Basically, with the journalist's questions I felt like I was writing things down just to fill space on a page, but that I was only writing things down that I already knew. I generated no fresh ideas and if I were to write an essay on that topic I would have to use another method of pre-writing.

The next post will address an additional three topics.

-Ace