How to Brainstorm | Academic Help. Online Academic Writing Help

Brainstorming is an essential part of writing. No matter whether you?ve got a common disease called writer?s block, don?t know what to write about or, on the contrary, feel rather confident in your abilities, brainstorming is an activity that you must do to create a good piece of writing. Generally speaking, the term brainstorming means generating as many ideas on the subject as possible with their subsequent sorting and selection. The outcome of a brainstorming process is usually a number of words, phrases or concepts that are relevant to the subject chosen by the writer.

Brainstorming Process

1. Prepare for the process of brainstorming. Turn on your laptop, or take a simple piece of paper and a writing instrument: you will need to write down your thoughts. Intriguingly, the condition of your workplace seems to affect the efficiency of the brainstorming session, so see to it that you have your workplace clear.
2. Set yourself a time limit. Though it may seem that the more time you spend on brainstorming the better, actually, 15-20 minutes for a session is usually enough.
3. Concentrate on your subject, and write down all the ideas and thoughts about it that come to your head. At this point, trying to organize your thoughts or sorting them out will only harm the efficiency of the process. This stage requires focusing on plain writing.
4. After your stream of thoughts dries out, see through the whole list. Now it is time to evaluate and regroup all the thoughts that you?ve written down so far. Choose the ideas that seem most valuable and intelligible and which you will use for writing; reorganize the ideas into sequential categories of importance.
5. If you consider your collection to be sufficient enough, use it to start creating a rough outline of your future piece of writing.

Brainstorming Techniques

There exists a vast amount of brainstorming techniques that can be applied during the creative process. These techniques can be divided into those that are used by a group of people working on the same subject, or by a single writer who works on his own. Some of the most popular brainstorming techniques are listed below:

Mind mapping. This is one of the most popular and interesting techniques; it assumes building your ideas using previously generated thoughts. To create a mind map, write down your certain idea and draw a circle around it. Then write down some ideas referring to the first one, take them in circles too, and connect them with the center circle. Do the same for each smaller idea. This procedure will help you notice your ideas and how they are connected.

Free writing. This method implies a completely free and uncensored flow of thoughts, when you don?t know where your mind will lead you. Your only task is to be in the present, writing everything down. This technique actually involves your subconscious into the creative process.

Questions. Instead of trying to write on the topic, start asking yourself questions about it. Answering these questions will give you ideas for writing.

Rolestorming. Imagine that you are someone else ? a person of a different gender, age, race and so on. Try thinking about your subject from this person?s point of view and see what happens.

Key Points to Consider

1. Brainstorming won?t necessarily completely break your writer?s block and shower you with great ideas immediately as you start doing it. Treat it more like a good warm-up exercise for your mind that will at least set you on course. Brainstorming is useful not only when you cannot think of any ideas relevant to your topic, but on the contrary, when your head is stuffed with various ideas, so that you feel a completely chaotic and disorganized. It will help you pull out your most significant thoughts one by one, without trying to decide where to start from.
2. Success of group brainstorming to a significant extent depends on the psychological atmosphere among the participants, so the role of the moderator is important.
3. A good way to whip up your thinking is to use associations. This way you can come to some interesting thoughts without excessive efforts, and expand some random words into an almost complete plot.
4. During group brainstorming sessions, discipline is among the key factors of successful idea generation. If the moderator of the session allows at least one of the participants to criticize someone?s thoughts, others will be discouraged from expressing some outrageous and spontaneous ideas to avoid mocking, and will tend to speak out only ?quality? ideas, which are often vapid and constrained.

Dos and Don?ts

Dos Do try to expand on every idea that you?ve written down, even if it seems absurd or somewhat irrelevant to your subject. Do review your list of ideas when you feel that the process is getting stalled. Some of the previously noted thoughts can whip up your thinking. Do go rather for quantity than for quality when generating and noting your thoughts. It is easier to distinguish some amount of good thoughts from those that are worse, than to immediately generate a bright and fresh idea. Do consider even those ideas that seem to be completely wild and impractical. Do start with a well-formulated statement of the subject that you need to write on, or your purpose for writing.

Don?ts Don?t neglect some of the ideas simply because they seem weird or absurd to you. On the contrary, these ideas are often the brightest. Write literally every thought on the subject that comes to your head while brainstorming. Don?t criticize thoughts that come out during the process of brainstorming. Critiquing is a complete taboo. Don?t write your thoughts in details, just sketch out the main points so that you were able to grasp the whole idea later. Don?t organize expressing ideas in turns if you have a group brainstorming session. Good ideas are usually expressed spontaneously, so if you make everyone just sit and wait for their turn to talk, the flow will be forced and not productive. Don?t be afraid to ride ideas of other people during group brainstorming. If you hear your colleague speak out an interesting thought, develop it, add some extensions, offer counter-proposals.

Common Mistakes When Brainstorming

- Trying to structure out the brainstorming process immediately, during the very process of generating ideas. Leave all kinds of editing and organizing for later, otherwise you will get distracted and may lose inspiration and the spontaneity of thinking.

- Analyzing the ideas that came out during brainstorming, criticizing and neglecting them without expanding just because they seem inappropriate.

-Dismissing brainstorming if one or more good ideas appear in the very beginning of the session. This is actually a self-robbery, because if you come up with several good ideas from the beginning, you can produce even more of them if you continue the session.

- Trying to come up with a fresh and original idea from scratch. Brainstorming is more about quantity, so your best option is to forget about quality for a while. You definitely can develop one bad idea into several good ones, but it is extremely difficult to produce these ideas without preparation and engaging in a creative search.

Title: How to Brainstorm
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