I took a “Writing Workshop” last fall at NCC and I learned some of these techniques in class. Taking the time to sit down and think about the purpose of my paper, as well as the audience it is written for helped me shape my essays. My other favorite one is free-writing; sometimes I feel like I have a lot of thoughts in my head but I can’t find the right way to write them down. This technique helps me to create a draft of thoughts that I can later organize in an adequate order and rewrite in a clear format.
In the near future I would like to try and carry a pocket-sized notebook with me in case I want to write down any good ideas that come to me when I’m not at home. It has occurred to me that I have an extraordinary thought for one of my papers and by the time I get home it is nearly impossible for me to remember.
2. Give one of the prewriting techniques a try -- perhaps free-writing or clustering. We will be writing a paper on education in the next couple weeks, so use your personal experiences in education, particularly in high school, as your topic. You can do this exercise on the computer or on paper but you do not need to submit it to me. What I would like you to write here is a report on how it went. Which technique did you use and how well did you like it? (Again, you don't need to include the exercise itself.) I have attached the Essay #1 assignment to this exercise in case you want to read it to focus your prewriting exercise.
I decided to try clustering because I never used this technique before. I found this method to be very fun. I used “Experiences in High School” as the main idea, which I further divided into good and bad experiences. From here it branched following the flow of ideas. I liked it because I didn’t need to write complete sentences in order to express a thought;