What is Prewriting (Brainstorming)?
Prewriting activities help you generate and refine paper-topic ideas. Most writers begin with only a vague or superficial idea of what they want to write about. Prewriting helps you develop your topic by reminding you of what you already know, clarifying what you have yet to learn, and discovering which dimensions of the subject have the greatest “emotional heat” for you. There are a wide variety of prewriting activities that can help you move forward from your first-impulse writing ideas to a well-defined topic that addresses the requirements of the assignment, audience need, and appropriately assesses the scope of coverage. The most common of these are Clustering, Cubing, Dialoguing, Dramatizing, Free-writing, Listing, Matrixing, Outlining, and Topical Invention. These activities can be combined and customized to fit your personal working style and the needs of the assignment. Links to sites that explain each of these brainstorming activities in greater detail appear at the bottom of
