Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Plan Before You Write

Writing essays, articles, journals, or even movies is difficult enough. Though everyone has their own style and way of writing, there is one word that has the potential to help us all…planning. A simple plan to writing may just consist of a bubble web, which is just one of many graphic flowcharts.  To enhance the writing into an elaborate and well organized piece, take the flowchart and use it as a plan for another plan. The other plan in this case would be an outline. You can then form subtopics (from each bubble) as a base for each key topic in the outline, leaving room to include direct quotations, or short summaries to guide your thinking.  You can even turn them into questions to make sure you have clearly explained each topic or issue. It may even help form and organize sub arguments to help support the overall argument.  By using an outline, you can then insert an introduction and conclusion whenever necessary without throwing off the organization of the whole entire paper. As changes in the outline are made, alterations to these add-ins can be made as well. Besides adding in the introduction and conclusion, transitions can also be put in without causing chaos to the paper.  Including transitions before writing the essay or other piece, will make paragraphs flow together without completely changing the meaning of the next paragraph (which could easily happen if the paper was not planned). By planning your writing ahead of time, it could mean writing less drafts, saving more time, or even less chaos overall.   

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