The Ministry of Higher and secondary education of the Republic of Uzbekistan The Uzbekistan state World Languages University

Planning and Drafting Your Paper: Exploration

Saving money Trendiness

Home ownership Human rights

Schools in your town Public transportation

Leisure activities Childhood fears

Trends in technology A new scientific discovery

A best-selling book A religious experience

Activity 2.


Freewriting
The freewriting strategy snares thoughts as they race through

your mind, yielding a set of sentences that you then look over for writing ideas.

To begin, turn your pen loose and write for about five minutes on your general

subject. Put down everything that comes into your head, without worrying about

grammar, spelling, or punctuation. What you produce is for your eyes alone.

If the thought flow becomes blocked, write “I’m stuck, I’m stuck …” until you

break the mental logjam. When your writing time is up, go through your sentences one by one and extract potential topic material. If you draw a blank, write

for another five minutes and look again. A useful strategy is to take key ideas or

phrases from your freewriting and then in a separate page or file do additional

freewriting on each of those ideas or phrases.

The following example shows the product of one freewriting session. Drew’s

instructor had assigned a two- or three-page paper on technology; and since

Drew is a business major, he considers a more personal technology with which

he has experience, the cell phone.

Technology, huh. What do I know about technology? Cell phones are technology? What about them? There are so many kinds. Razors, Blackberries. I love

my new iPhone. It does everything, plays music, lets me text, check out YouTube,

e-mail, take pictures and store them. They change people lives. But how? Well,

we are always on them talking to friends, to anybody, and parents and teachers never get it. But why do we talk on them so much. Stuck, stuck, stuck. Well,

I keep in touch with friends. Some are away at college. My girlfriend is always

calling me. We also get lots of stuff done, like checking out my stupid bills.

This example suggests at least three papers. For people shopping for a new

cell phone, Drew could identify the advantages of different types. He could

write to people who are considering buying an iPhone about the features of the

phone. He could write to those perplexed by student behavior to explain why

students use cell phones so extensively.

Brainstorming

Brainstorming, a close cousin of freewriting, captures fleeting ideas in words, fragments, and sometimes sentences, rather than in a series

of sentences. Brainstorming garners ideas faster than the other strategies do.

But unless you move immediately to the next stage of writing, you may lose track

of what some of your fragmentary jottings mean.

To compare the results of freewriting and brainstorming a topic, we’ve

converted our freewriting example into this list, which typifies the results of

brainstorming: