The importance of Cluster method in teaching English

Forest cluster

In my cluster, I made the jump from family to support, whereas someone with a more negative experience of a family unit would’ve never made this connection.

By looking at our leaps objectively, we can begin to understand what aspects of our thought processes make us different. This allows us to highlight and personalize our writing further with our own unique way of viewing the world.

Clusters will enable us to understand where our connections are made; this takes away any fear of our connections being weak or unsure because on a personal level we know how we developed our scene or character.

I scribbled this on paper at first because for some reason putting pen to paper allows me to be more honest about what I’m feeling. Starting with the root word you progressively write down what you feel about each word as it crops up.

It’s like a game of word association without the element of a time limit, although a time limit can be helpful for some thinkers as speed correlates to immediate thoughts. This helps you to jot down reflex thoughts without needing to explore the immediate emotions correlated with them.

From looking at this cluster, you can see that I have a fairly optimistic relationship with forests as a lot of my cluster routes end in positivity. However, there are some negative, darker paths. This shows me that if I were to utilize this cluster I’ve got a few different types of emotions I can use in this scene.

I could move it from a safe place to a place of loneliness or chaos in just a few turns of the page. This could play out in a lot of different ways, and it’s fun to explore the paths I could take my characters on.

Other ways clustering is useful.

This is just one of the ways a cluster can be used, it also is fantastic for poetry writing, creating short stories and freewriting. It’s definitely a technique you should

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try out in any future writing endeavors. Clusters are something you can add to your story bank.

You can always refer back to it if you are experiencing a bit of a lull in the story or want to add more detail, to figure out where your next turn should be.

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