Brainstorming
What this handout is about
This handout discusses techniques that will help you start writing a paper and continue writing
through the challenges of the revising process. Brainstorming can help you choose a topic, develop
an approach to a topic, or deepen your understanding of the topic’s potential.
Introduction
If you consciously take advantage of your natural thinking processes by gathering your brain’s
energies into a “storm,” you can transform these energies into written words or diagrams that will
lead to lively, vibrant writing. Below you will find a brief discussion of what brainstorming is, why you
might brainstorm, and suggestions for how you might brainstorm.
Whether you are starting with too much information or not enough, brainstorming can help you to
put a new writing task in motion or revive a project that hasn’t reached completion. Let’s take a look
at each case:
When you’ve got nothing: You might need a storm to approach when you feel “blank” about the topic,
devoid of inspiration, full of anxiety about the topic, or just too tired to craft an orderly outline. In this
case, brainstorming stirs up the dust, whips some air into our stilled pools of thought, and gets the
breeze of inspiration moving again.
When you’ve got too much: There are times when you have too much chaos in your brain and need
to bring in some conscious order. In this case, brainstorming forces the mental chaos and random
thoughts to rain out onto the page, giving you some concrete words or schemas that you can then
arrange according to their logical relations.
Brainstorming techniques
What follows are great ideas on how to brainstorm—ideas from professional writers, novice writers,
people who would rather avoid writing, and people who spend a lot of time brainstorming about…
well, how to brainstorm.
Try out several of these options and challenge yourself to vary the techniques you rely on; some
techniques might suit a particular writer, academic discipline, or assignment better than others. If
the technique you try first doesn’t seem to help you, move right along and try some others.
, Freewriting
When you freewrite, you let your thoughts flow as they will, putting pen to paper and writing down
whatever comes into your mind. You don’t judge the quality of what you write and you don’t worry
about style or any surface-level issues, like spelling, grammar, or punctuation. If you can’t think of
what to say, you write that down—really. The advantage of this technique is that you free up your
internal critic and allow yourself to write things you might not write if you were being too self-
conscious.
When you freewrite you can set a time limit (“I’ll write for 15 minutes!”) and even use a kitchen timer
or alarm clock or you can set a space limit (“I’ll write until I fill four full notebook pages, no matter
what tries to interrupt me!”) and just write until you reach that goal. You might do this on the
computer or on paper, and you can even try it with your eyes shut or the monitor off, which
encourages speed and freedom of thought.
The crucial point is that you keep on writing even if you believe you are saying nothing. Word must
follow word, no matter the relevance. Your freewriting might even look like this:
“This paper is supposed to be on the politics of tobacco production but even though I went to all the
lectures and read the book I can’t think of what to say and I’ve felt this way for four minutes now and
I have 11 minutes left and I wonder if I’ll keep thinking nothing during every minute but I’m not sure if
it matters that I am babbling and I don’t know what else to say about this topic and it is rainy today
and I never noticed the number of cracks in that wall before and those cracks remind me of the walls
in my grandfather’s study and he smoked and he farmed and I wonder why he didn’t farm tobacco…”
When you’re done with your set number of minutes or have reached your page goal, read back over
the text. Yes, there will be a lot of filler and unusable thoughts but there also will be little gems,
discoveries, and insights. When you find these gems, highlight them or cut and paste them into your
draft or onto an “ideas” sheet so you can use them in your paper. Even if you don’t find any
diamonds in there, you will have either quieted some of the noisy chaos or greased the writing gears
so that you can now face the assigned paper topic.
Break down the topic into levels
Once you have a course assignment in front of you, you might brainstorm:
the general topic, like “The relationship between tropical fruits and colonial powers”
a specific subtopic or required question, like “How did the availability of multiple tropical
fruits influence competition amongst colonial powers trading from the larger Caribbean
islands during the 19th century?”
a single term or phrase that you sense you’re overusing in the paper. For example: If you see
that you’ve written “increased the competition” about a dozen times in your “tropical fruits”
What this handout is about
This handout discusses techniques that will help you start writing a paper and continue writing
through the challenges of the revising process. Brainstorming can help you choose a topic, develop
an approach to a topic, or deepen your understanding of the topic’s potential.
Introduction
If you consciously take advantage of your natural thinking processes by gathering your brain’s
energies into a “storm,” you can transform these energies into written words or diagrams that will
lead to lively, vibrant writing. Below you will find a brief discussion of what brainstorming is, why you
might brainstorm, and suggestions for how you might brainstorm.
Whether you are starting with too much information or not enough, brainstorming can help you to
put a new writing task in motion or revive a project that hasn’t reached completion. Let’s take a look
at each case:
When you’ve got nothing: You might need a storm to approach when you feel “blank” about the topic,
devoid of inspiration, full of anxiety about the topic, or just too tired to craft an orderly outline. In this
case, brainstorming stirs up the dust, whips some air into our stilled pools of thought, and gets the
breeze of inspiration moving again.
When you’ve got too much: There are times when you have too much chaos in your brain and need
to bring in some conscious order. In this case, brainstorming forces the mental chaos and random
thoughts to rain out onto the page, giving you some concrete words or schemas that you can then
arrange according to their logical relations.
Brainstorming techniques
What follows are great ideas on how to brainstorm—ideas from professional writers, novice writers,
people who would rather avoid writing, and people who spend a lot of time brainstorming about…
well, how to brainstorm.
Try out several of these options and challenge yourself to vary the techniques you rely on; some
techniques might suit a particular writer, academic discipline, or assignment better than others. If
the technique you try first doesn’t seem to help you, move right along and try some others.
, Freewriting
When you freewrite, you let your thoughts flow as they will, putting pen to paper and writing down
whatever comes into your mind. You don’t judge the quality of what you write and you don’t worry
about style or any surface-level issues, like spelling, grammar, or punctuation. If you can’t think of
what to say, you write that down—really. The advantage of this technique is that you free up your
internal critic and allow yourself to write things you might not write if you were being too self-
conscious.
When you freewrite you can set a time limit (“I’ll write for 15 minutes!”) and even use a kitchen timer
or alarm clock or you can set a space limit (“I’ll write until I fill four full notebook pages, no matter
what tries to interrupt me!”) and just write until you reach that goal. You might do this on the
computer or on paper, and you can even try it with your eyes shut or the monitor off, which
encourages speed and freedom of thought.
The crucial point is that you keep on writing even if you believe you are saying nothing. Word must
follow word, no matter the relevance. Your freewriting might even look like this:
“This paper is supposed to be on the politics of tobacco production but even though I went to all the
lectures and read the book I can’t think of what to say and I’ve felt this way for four minutes now and
I have 11 minutes left and I wonder if I’ll keep thinking nothing during every minute but I’m not sure if
it matters that I am babbling and I don’t know what else to say about this topic and it is rainy today
and I never noticed the number of cracks in that wall before and those cracks remind me of the walls
in my grandfather’s study and he smoked and he farmed and I wonder why he didn’t farm tobacco…”
When you’re done with your set number of minutes or have reached your page goal, read back over
the text. Yes, there will be a lot of filler and unusable thoughts but there also will be little gems,
discoveries, and insights. When you find these gems, highlight them or cut and paste them into your
draft or onto an “ideas” sheet so you can use them in your paper. Even if you don’t find any
diamonds in there, you will have either quieted some of the noisy chaos or greased the writing gears
so that you can now face the assigned paper topic.
Break down the topic into levels
Once you have a course assignment in front of you, you might brainstorm:
the general topic, like “The relationship between tropical fruits and colonial powers”
a specific subtopic or required question, like “How did the availability of multiple tropical
fruits influence competition amongst colonial powers trading from the larger Caribbean
islands during the 19th century?”
a single term or phrase that you sense you’re overusing in the paper. For example: If you see
that you’ve written “increased the competition” about a dozen times in your “tropical fruits”
