Introduction
If you actively use your natural thinking processes, such as amassing your brain's energy into a "storm," you can convert these forces into written words or diagrams, resulting in colourful, vibrant writing. Below is a basic explanation of what brainstorming is, why you would brainstorm, and ideas for how to brainstorm.
Whether you have too much or too little knowledge, brainstorming can help you get started on a new writing project or resuscitate an unfinished one. Let's look at each case.
When you have nothing: You may require a storm to approach when you are "blank" regarding the issue, empty of creativity, anxious about the topic, or simply too exhausted to create an orderly framework. In this situation, brainstorming shakes up the dust, blows some air into our stagnant pools of thinking, and rekindles the wind of inspiration.
When you have too much: There are moments when your brain is too chaotic and you need to restore some conscious order. In this situation, brainstorming causes mental turmoil and random thoughts to pour out onto the page, resulting in actual words or schemas that you may later arrange according to their logical relationships.
Brainstorming techniques:
Here are wonderful suggestions for brainstorming from expert writers, novice writers, non-writers, and those who spend a lot of time thinking about it.
Try out a few of these possibilities and challenge yourself to change up the approaches you use; some techniques may fit a specific writer, academic subject, or task better than others. If the first technique you try doesn't appear to work, move on to the next one.
Three viewpoints:
Looking at something from different angles allows you to perceive it more fully—or at least in an entirely new way, similar to how laying on the floor makes your desk appear extremely different to you. To apply this method, answer the questions for each of the three perspectives, and then seek for intriguing relationships or mismatches to investigate:
Describe it: Describe your subject in depth. What is your topic? What are the components? What are its distinctive and distinguishing characteristics? What are the puzzles? Differentiate your subject from others that are comparable to it. How does your subject differ from others?
Trace it:What is the history of your subject? How have things altered throughout time? Why? What are the key events that inspired your subject?
Map it:What is your subject about? What is it influenced by? How? What does it affect? How? Who has an interest in your topic? Why? What domains do you draw on to study your subject? Why? How have others approached your subject? How does their work relate to yours?
Closing:
What do you do now that you've exhausted all of your brainstorming tools and are faced with sheets of scrawled ideas, bulleted subtopics, or spidery webs relating to your paper?
Take the next step and begin writing your first draft, or fill in the gaps you've been thinking about to finish your "almost ready" paper. If you enjoy outlining, create one that includes as much of your brainstorming info as you believe is logical. If you aren't a fan, don't create one. Instead, begin to compose larger chunks (huge groupings of sentences or entire paragraphs) to expand on your smaller clusters and phrases. Build up from there into greater sections of your paper. You don't need to start from the beginning.
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