Chapter 4 of our reading in Envision focuses primarily on generating ideas to research. First and foremost, this is something that I've never struggled with, but it still brought to my attention a few interesting strategies to test in the future.
The very first strategy the text mentions involves looking at a given source and asking questions about it. It's an incredibly easy way to find ideas, especially when dealing with visual images or actual speech. For example, you could ask the simple question of why a speaker worded a phrase the way he or she did. Such a simple questions has a nearly infinite number of answers. This was my favorite strategy mentioned simply because it's so versatile.
Once an over-arching question has been established, writers often end up with too much information. I've been the victim of this on a number of occasions, and the text has a simple solution. Boil it down.
Instead of answering a broad question such as "why?" like in my example above, a writer can narrow the question further. An example of this would be, "Why does the author want to convince people that dogs are better than cats?" That question would replace the former question of, "Why does the author word this sentence in a pro-dog way." The latter statement has a huge number of potential answers and questions. One of those questions is the former statement, and the first statement is much narrower than the broad second statement. This process may need to be repeated several times before it is narrow enough for the writer to work with, but it's still very effective.
Chapter 4 is all about preparation. It's one of the things that I am simply not very good at. There's a few specific strategies that I would like to try out over the course of the semester, and it'll be interesting to see how they work out.
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