How to generate ideas for academic writing?

Every writer goes through a phase where either he is short of writing ideas or has a chaotic flood of ideas in his mind. A writer may be of any kind or zone needs to have a clear picture in his mind in order to write down an effective plot. A situation of ‘Writer’s bloc’ leaves the writers very restless and therefore the best technique here to ease out is prewriting. Prewriting is the first stage of writing process where a writer can experiment with the ideas just the way he/she wants. The purpose of prewriting is to find a pattern or provide a structure to the entire messy cloud of thoughts in your head. Here are some prewriting techniques for you to ease out the writing task.

Thinking: This is a first basic step to do any task. No matter wherever you are, just start thinking about the topic you are assigned to work on. Let your mind be free and gradually you will realize that a gigantic storm of ideas is swirling in your head.

Free writing: It is a form of prewriting where the writer writes freely for a set period of time without worrying about spellings, grammar errors or typos. It is all about writing whatever comes to your mind and till the time your page goal is attained. Once you are done with it, read all that you have written. You will find some little ideas which can be developed into your next writing project.

Brainstorming: It is a very popular idea amongst us since decades to generate fresh ideas. This effective technique can be used by writers to easily zero down the topic for their next write up.

Listing: It is an important follow up of brainstorming where you just need to list down all the ideas that come to your mind after brainstorming. This way you won’t forget to include all necessary points to make your write up informative and impactful.

Clustering/ mind mapping: Here, write down the topic in the center of the page which is difficult for you to develop further and highlight it by circling it. Now, think of the idea that relates to this topic and write it down on paper. Again think of a new idea in the same way and write it down on paper. Now, just see how these ideas can be linked with each other and with the circled topic on the page. This is how a web or cluster of ideas will be created which can take you off to your next flight of writing.

Cubing: It is a critical thinking process where you analyse your stalled project from different angles in order to come to a final decision on how to proceed with your writing. For example, describe the topic, its uses, advantages, disadvantages, how can it affect the environment and what’s its future. This is how one or the other of these strategies can work to make you find the next academic writing topic.

Prewriting is the first stage of writing process where a writer can experiment with the ideas just the way he/she wants.