Planning and Prewriting

When you receive a writing assignment, the possibilities for development are limitless. Before you can begin writing a draft, you need to generate material about which to write. This is accomplished in a planning and prewriting process. Often times, students underestimate the importance of prewriting. Thus, they short change it or skip it altogether and wonder why they are experiencing writer's block. There are a number of prewriting strategies. Most writers engage in a combination of two or more of the following:

• Brainstorming
• Mapping/Clustering
• List making
• Asking questions
• Freewriting

The purpose of all of the above is to focus your thinking on the writing project at hand and to explore the different possibilities. Most people are, to varying degrees, visual learners. Prewriting allows you to capture the ideas and thoughts and snippets of inspiration that seem to swim inside your head and place them on paper. Once you have ideas written down, you can focus and develop and organize them. The key to prewriting is generating ideas. At this point, you should not be concerned with spelling or grammar or punctuation; just focus on getting as many ideas down on paper as you can.

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