Prewriting
Prewriting, also know as invention or planning, refers to all activities that take place before drafting. Many of the act ivies listed on this page involve writing in some way to generate paper ideas or help solve organizational problems, but just thinking about an upcoming paper in the shower or in the car is also prewriting. Finally, it is important to note that prewriting strategies may be used at other times during the writing process when it becomes necessary to generate new material. Prewriting strategies include, but are not limited to: brainstorming and clustering, freewriting, journals, and heuristics also known as questions, and outlining.
The basic idea of brainstorming is to generate a list of items related to a topic and then to cluster those times in a meaningful way.
Freewriting is probably one of the best known prewriting strategies and one of the most useful. Popularized by Peter Elbow, the goal of Freewriting is to get words on paper, to fill up the blank page without worrying about grammar, spelling, or even coherence.
A journal can be a good way to collect and organize sources and drafts for a writing project. It can be especially helpful with large research projects.
Heuristics are questions that a writer can use to explore a topic. It is important to remember that these questions don't have a right or wrong answer. A simple example of a set of Heuristic questions would be the journalist questions of Who? What? When? Where? and How?
Outlining is a strategy better saved for later in the prewriting stage and can helpful in organizing material generated by other prewriting strategies.
