Pre-Writing

The Writing Process doesn’t start when you begin drafting sentences and paragraphs. It starts much, much earlier than that, with a stage called Pre-Writing.  Before you attempt to write a draft (let alone a finished paper), there is much work to do.  You must first come up with ideas and “raw material” for your writing, and then you must organize and plan what you are going to write.  The type or amount of planning will depend on what works for each writer for a particular type of composition. A longer document making an argument needs much more—maybe even a formal outline or idea map (5.2).  A shorter, less formal, or more personal piece may require little planning. Without completing these first two steps, you may find it extremely difficult to compose an organized piece of writing that has sufficient development and detail. 

Generating Ideas

The first step in The Writing Process is generating ideas.  Just as when people who build or manufacture things first must gather raw materials, writers must also gather information and facts with which to work.  Obviously, the types of ideas that you might generate are different, depending on which kind of writing you are doing.  A narrative essay, for example, might require you to remember sights, sounds, and smells, the details of a particular conversation, or what a particular experience felt like emotionally.  

For a comparison-contrast essay, however, you might need to recover many descriptive details about the things you are comparing.  Likewise, if you are writing an argumentative essay, you will likely spend much of your time gathering facts and evidence related to the claim you are making in the essay, and thinking about the best order in which to present those facts.

There are many methods that writers use to generate ideas; as you explore the following methods, you should choose the one that works best for you.  Popular methods of generating ideas include the following:

• Freewriting
• Looping
• Brainstorming
• Questioning
• Branching / Clustering 

Continue to Part 2 this chapter to see more detail on each method:   Composition 02a: Generating Ideas 2.