Pre-Writing Techniques

A lot of students don’t appreciate the importance of pre-writing or brainstorming or warming up to write. Often they want to sit down and start putting pen to paper immediately. However taking a few minutes to think and plan and get your brain working is an important part of writing a good essay. If you know what you are going to say, you can concentrate more on grammar and style while you write.

So here are a couple of good exercises to give students in order to help their brain warm up before they get to writing. Some of these techniques are more appropriate for thinking about fiction writing or personal writing and others are better for preparing an academic essay, but generally any kind of pre-writing will be useful.

1) Pre-writing - the technique used are:

• Brain-storming (brainstorm for an idea and point)
• Mind-maping (generate and classify the idea)
• Free writing (pre-writing technique for a set period of time without regard to spelling and grammar)
• Quick writing (involve creative and critical thinking)

2) Planning and organizing

• Essay outline to write a clear well-focused piece of with sensible ideas and meaningful.

3) Drafting

• The process of writing down ideas, organizing them into a sequences, and providing the reader with a frame for understanding these ideas.

4) Revising & editing

• Re-check the essay

5) Conclusion

• Final essay