5 Brainstorming

Brainstorming is the process of thinking of ideas for a project or piece of writing. It is where your essay begins. Brainstorming can be done in any language, even for our ESL class. However, I recommend that you try brainstorming in English; this will help you start thinking in English and will make writing your essay in English easier.

You can think of brainstorming as a storm in your brain. It is an exercise in which all of your ideas fly wild. It is a time to let your ideas come without judgment.

There is not one right way to brainstorm. If your brainstorming method helps you think of a lot of ideas, then it is a good method. That being said, there are some popular methods of brainstorming that you might want to try to find the best fit for you. These include:

1. Rapidly listing every idea that comes to mind(I will give an example of this later)
2. Free-writing your ideas without paying attention to organization, spelling, or grammar
3. Talking out loud and recording your ideas with your cell phone
4. Drawing a mind map (I will give an example of this later)
5. Talking to a friend or professor
6. Having a conversation with AI (without copying and pasting!)
7. Taking a walk outside and thinking (my favorite!)
8. Using a combination of any of these

With any of these methods, your ideas will look messy at first, and that’s okay! The first step is just to think.

At some point, you will want to organize your ideas to make it easier to organize your essay later. I find that listing and mind-mapping are especially easy ways to do this. Let’s look at examples. These are about the essay topic: What are the qualities of a good boss?

There are 22 items in the list, but you might have more or fewer. It depends on your passion for and experience with the topic. I recommend writing down at least 15 to make sure you have plenty of ideas to choose from for your essay.

You might be thinking that this list is disorganized, and you would be right. There are general ideas, specific ideas, and repetitive ideas, all in a random order. That is why it is a good idea to organize your list into different categories next. But let’s eliminate repetitive ideas first:

I decided to delete “understanding” because it is very similar to “empathetic.” There are still a lot of ideas on the list that are related to each other, and that is okay. Now, let’s organize the rest:

What should we notice about this organized list?

1. I took some of the more general ideas from my list (“kind,” intelligent,” etc.) and made them list titles.
2. I added “generous” to label a group of ideas. You are allowed to add or delete ideas at any point in the brainstorming process!
3. I did not use all of my original ideas in my organized lists. Sometimes, we decide that we don’t like an idea anymore or that it does not clearly fit into any of our groups.
4. There is more than one correct way to organize ideas. For example, one might not consider giving sick days generous; maybe this is just part of being a responsible boss. As long as your organization is logical, it should work for your essay.

This organized list will help us a lot when we start our essay. We will discuss the next steps in later chapters. First, let’s look at another method of brainstorming called mind mapping:

As you can see, the benefit of mind mapping is that you organize your ideas as you think of them. This is because you can draw connections between your ideas as you go!

Mind Map Practice 1

Note: This tool (LucidSpark) is embedded into Canvas so is only available to current Reading/Writing III students in Lindsey Hageman’s course.