Pre-writing Techniques

I must admit I haven’t used most of the methods covered by the book as methods of pre-writing. I have done some brainstorming/listing when it comes to school work related projects and I have done some form of freewriting but even that would be by loose definition of the word. It is one of those skills I have not yet developed in a meaningful way but I have a strong suspicion its one of the reasons I do not have a fond appreciation of writing type assignments. I try to be an organized person for most of what I do but when it come to writing assignments in the past I almost always do a little reading then I start writing and go from there, doing spot revisions as I go and in depth research when I come across the topic I need information on. This results in a rough draft that I then review, do a few more spot edits, then I hand over to a friend for one final look through.

I think that if I were to develop some of these pre-writing skills it would make the whole project less stressful and significantly more enjoyable than they have been in the past. I should start the projects more with a listing type activity trying to think up many of the relevant topics or ideas. I can then use this to help develop the free writing, less as a whole paper and more as individual topics to help trim up the paper by finding the relevant ideas and remove some of the unnecessary fluff. Other ones that I think would be interesting on larger projects would be things like looping and clustering to help develop ideas in the early stages and find the transition points easier.