Prewriting Techniques

Prewriting, according the Webster’s Dictionary, is the “preparatory work for a piece of writing, as idea formulation, an outline, or research.”  Prewriting is a topic that has been stressed throughout my educational career even at the beginning stages of writing in grade school. Teachers and professors along the way have given multiple examples and the pros and cons of about every prewriting style there is on this planet. They then go on to why or why not using that technique would be successful, or often times, unsuccessful. Personally, for me, I only found a few of those topics actually useful in my prewriting process, and then began to narrow it down to just sticking to one technique as my writing career became more rigorous. From our class handout, I found it very useful that they laid out each technique that the author thought could be useful, or has been a popular tool for writers today. Looking at this list, and remembering how I went about things in my past, there were a few techniques mentioned in our handout that were very a very helpful tool for me. Techniques such as listing, mapping, and clustering/branching were extremely influential and educational towards my writing development.  The “clustering” technique I found to be the more useful out of the three listed above. Often times I still continue to use this technique, and/or an outline, to prewrite for many of the papers I have written over the last few years of my education. I find this the most helpful because you can get so many great ideas from a technique that just lets you freely formulate numerous ideas and just throw them down on the paper. Although, in saying these tools were useful to me, there are many benefits to all of the other methods discussed in our handout and I don’t think there is a wrong way to actually prewrite, it’s kind of just what’s best for the writer. In saying that, I do suggest that if you have not tried out almost every method known to man, it would be a good idea! Whether we want to admit it or not, there are some “fun” ways to express your thinking via prewriting activities.