Prewriting is any activities that guide students to garner effective ideas to begin writing a research paper or an essay with enough confidence. Prewriting is relevant since it helps students or writers in the preparation stage when writing an essay. Some other advantages include;

It saves time for students and writers.

Get your ideas in the flowing state.

Help in producing a well-written essay or paper

The most fruitful skill is to learn how to tell more but with little wordings. Young children don’t always write what they speak. But as a writer, you need to master the magic of writing what you speak as a way of attracting attention from readers. For you to be successful in this, you need to understand and practice specific written language tools. The effective basic tools in academic writing are prewriting strategies and grammatical metaphor.

So, assume you want your assignment done quickly and secure an excellent grade, what will you do as a college student? It would be best if you had effective prewriting strategies and skills, and that is what we have for you in this article.

#1: Pre-Structuring

Pre-structuring is the most useful and relevant step when prewriting an essay. It is the foundation of the well or poorly done paper. It requires much work in terms of research and brainstorming. Plan it well before you decide to resort any other step ahead, and you will save yourself energy, a lot of time, embarrassments and frustrations.

But before we discuss another strategy, here are the questions and things you need to resolve in the pre-structuring stage;

What is the ideal goal of your assignment?

First, before anything else, you need to ask yourself- “what is my ideal goal with this assignment?” The question will help you identify the concept of the paper. But in some cases, you will realize that your goal is not to create a bunch of writing or brainstorming. Sometimes you may spend little time doing writing exercises.

Remember your primary goal is to write or produce excellent research paper or essay, get a good grade and as well learn something powerful in the process. If you believe the same statement above is true, then here is another hard truth: the role of prewriting is usually a target to get you ready and prepared for the actual project.

It may sound weird, but usually, it does prepare you for great work. So, what can you do to make the most of it and write a confounding essay effectively and quickly?

Answer……

Know the Outcome of the Story

Assume and think of scenarios where you don’t know the outcome of your project, you will lose focus. But, remember, the prewriting process can stretch out for hours or days depending on the subject you’re writing.  You may spend months in research before you settle to write the first introduction sentence.

But it is daunting to spend much time on that, here is what you should do to shorten the duration you spend in writing a paper:

Try to master as much as you can in finding enough clarity about your main argument and supporting points early enough. With this strategy, you can skip everything else and still manage to write that essay effortlessly and faster. But if you skip it, you may end up consuming much time but with less work done.

How can you relate the above insight into the real-life lesson? Let’s link it to a subject in neuroscience that will help you master the whole theory. You have a brain. And do you know it’s working mechanism? Its either YES or NO, but here is the revelation;

You have the unique mechanism called RAS- Reticular Activating System and works as a self-guiding missile. When your brain knows the results, it is tailored to get solutions for the same. However, when the outcome is not clear, finding the exact solution can take decades.

More probably, it may never happen, and you can relate it to a state trying to construct a large city without a well-figured address and description. It’s a hollow idea tunnel that can never end.

That is why World Best Writers figured out it’s of benefit to come up with these prewriting strategies for college students and writers. We mentioned pre-structuring previously, and we now want to take you through how it works- it involves three stages;

Apply the Power of Three

Even though there is the main focus that an essay target to address and pages to capture, there are some other critical aspects that a student need to address.

It must include the thesis (the main point of argument) and numerous ideas that support the thesis. The primary focus of prewriting is to provide clarification about your main point, and the next close step is to identify the supporting points.

Your thesis statement can sometimes remain a mystery even after spending hours and days in prewriting. You may have an exhaustive list of ideas to choose from. But again, it can make you more overwhelmed and confused instead of helping you.

Don’t worry; we still have a lot of resources to make you successful as a college student or learn academic writing. So, it is the solution that will make your life infinitely easier: Make good use of the power of three strategies to decide and have three supporting points for your main point.

Rough Out Your Word Count

You will get directions from your instructor about the number of pages and words needed for the assignment. But in situations where it is not clear, please request for clarification about what is expected of you. It will guide you through outlining the outcome of your assignment.

You see, now assume you need to write 950 words. The previous tip will help you figure out three supporting points that in return will help develop the following guideline;

Once you have the above structure or image in your mind, you’ll end up writing the best paper. It positively contributes to the clarity of your writing.

Highlight any other facts about the assignment

At this stage, you now have the picture of the whole structure and word count for each section of the paper. By referring to your assignment description, make a bulleted list of other details that are related to your assignment.

For instance,

It can be mentioning one of the main characters within the play- it can mention one particular character.

You should provide an answer to one or more specific questions. Keep in mind to list them in order.

Use some kind styles of speech, like simile or metaphor.

Make a concise list of activities mentioned in the assignment description. You know what? We now believe you are ready to jump onto the prewriting process. As you now get into other strategies, your brain will dictate well what to expect next. It now means that you’ll have an assignment done easier and faster. You will again experience an easy time doing the actual writing.

The final tip we will give you in this section is to minimize the other stages of pre-structuring. Try to figure out the main point as fast as you can. Then try to explore the three supporting ideas as fast as you can too.

Provided you have enough of the required information, stop prewriting and get directly to actual writing. And in any case, you need help with essay in general, contact a team of our experienced writers, and you will find appropriate support.

#2: Listing

We briefly discussed listing in the pre-structuring strategy section of this article. Here we want to explore at least a bit deeper to help you write a well-structured and composed essay. First, what is listing as a strategy in the prewriting?

Listing is but a type of brainstorming of which a writer creates a bulleted point as ideas that they use as a foundation block for essay writing. Listing is wide, and writers only focus on the points that they can use in their papers.

Your brain is transmittance, and you only need to pick a list of ideas that is relevant to the assignment paper. Once you are done with the pre-structuring, you will have ideas flowing a bit faster, and you will realize they relate to each other. Any moment you spot an idea that relates to the primary point, list them down for reference.

#3: Clustering

This is a strategy where you keep yourself and fall in love with the story. But it is simpler when you appropriately implement the listing strategy shared above. Some professors refer it as a mind-mapping strategy. It is the stage where you collect together different related ideas for a common goal.

Mind-mapping gets you closer in identifying the main point of argument and supporting points as discussed within the pre-structuring strategy in the previous section of this article.

Take the mind-mapping of an entrepreneur; he must think about marketing, design,  logo and identify. Check the illustration below and make it a picture of your essay writing clustering.

You can practice clustering on a piece of paper. You can as well do it in the form of listings that capture your initial ideas and remember they should nest under your main point. The whole concept of mapping is to come up with a visual presentation of your ideas. Some of the writers love pictures, and they understand more when they use visual presentations.

If you’re one who understands through diagrams or visuals, then you can look for a mind-mapping or clustering software for this strategy.

#4: Freewriting

Freewriting is a process where someone works with a timer. A writer set a timer for about five to thirty minutes and write nonstop until set time elapses. The purpose of freewriting is to keep the creativity flowing and to begin writing something as compared to starting on a blank screen.

With freewriting, you don’t need to be worried about spelling and grammar. You only need to keep your hand moving on keyboards if you’re using a computer or a pen moving when writing on a piece of paper. Even if some ideas seem irrelevant or silly, just put it down.

This strategy is more similar to listing. You can use freewriting method majorly if listing and clustering are not working well with you. All strategies may not be the best fit for you, including freewriting, but your role is to test everything and become a master on what is working for you.

From the introduction part, can you now tell the best strategy out of the previous steps? Not yet? We still have two more for you.

#5: Looping

We promised two more; looping is one of the remaining two. Guess what? You may now think looping is a combination of the previous two strategies; freewriting and clustering. It is okay, but after completing the first round, you will now grasp a bunch of ideas.

Select main point from the listed ideas and do freewriting for another five to ten minutes with much focus targeted to the same idea or topic. This will generate a tiny cloud of ideas from that smaller topic. You can continue and repeat the same procedure with another topic. After doing it a couple of times, you will again have several tiny clouds of topics much like networking cables in the server rooms.

Reminder, you can use this strategy if the other strategies are not a good fit for your prewriting activity.

#6: Six Journalist’s questions

Have you been here up to this end? Thank you and congratulations, we believe you’ve learned a lot from us, but we have a final strategy for you. Six Journalist’s questions is a strategy that uses six Journalist’s questions as a writer’s guidance. The questions include; what? Who? When? How? Where? and Why?

The six questions act as a mapping for writers. They help writers to think of answers to them which in return shorten their prewriting process. Start to think about the answers to the above question and write them down in the form of sentence or statement.

As world best writers, we thought information shared here would help you as a college student or a person who wants to learn essay writing. Would you like to help us grow in this niche and help many others?  If Yes, then drop us a comment.