|
Methods of Invention
Before you begin the actual writing, or drafting of your essay, you will need to narrow your topic to a focused
thesis, or main point, and then think of ideas, or specific content to support your point. This is called "prewriting."
Prewriting is the first stage of writing in which you generage ideas for your essay content.
One of the objectives of prewriting is to engage the "right side" of the brain, or the more creative side, and to hold at bay the
left side, or the more analytical and critical side, until you get some thoughts down on paper. You want to generate many ideas in the
prewriting stage -- later you can sift through them, evaluate them, and throw out the ones that won't work. For right now,
accept any and all ideas that come to you, and don't worry if they are "good" ones yet. Don't worry about spelling, punctuation,
or grammar at this stage of the writing process either. You want to assist your brain in the creative process and in producing
as many ideas as possible.
The following "methods of invention" will assist you in those tasks.
Brainstorming:
Clustering:
Freewriting:
Looping:
Heuristics:
Dialogue:
Journals:
Memories and Experiences:
Observations:
Research: Research can be as informal as perusing the daily paper or even weekly/monthly magazines or journals on your topic, just to gather ideas for writing.
If you are writing a research paper (as you will do for Advanced Composition, English 135), your research will be more formal. See
Research Sources and following for more information.
Refer to your Rules of Thumb text, pp. 61-64, for more information on methods of invention.
|
|