Office of the Vice-President for Academic Affairs
Struggling with writing? Excellence in Learning at DCU
ExL@DCU
BrainstormingOne good way of getting started on a written assignment is to brainstorm. The idea of brainstorming your ideas is that you simply note down as many ideas as possible about a topic, in words or phrases. You can do this task as a list but many people like to begin by arranging their ideas spatially as a concept map or mind map**. At this stage you should write down all ideas that come into your head, incorporating the notes you made while interrogating the question/title. Think creatively! See unit, ‘Creative thinking and critical thinking’. Later, as you begin to get a clear sense of what you will argue in your assignment, you can select and discard some items. There is an assumption here that you will have gathered all the material necessary for this assignment i.e. your lecture notes, your reading notes and any notes from additional material that you might have scanned or researched. (See units, ‘Active listening: note-taking in lectures’, ‘Active and critical reading’ and ‘Information literacy’).Take the topic ‘Climate Change’ for example. The following concept map might represent a map of an initial brainstorming session. Concept
Mapping tool download
available (free of charge!) from ‘The Institute for Human and
Machine Cognition’ (IHMC)
**Note: Concept mapping was discussed in the unit, ‘Active listening: note-taking
in lectures’, and you will see some more
examples of concept maps there and in the unit, ‘Active and critical
reading’.This allows you to create concept maps on your computer. The example above has been created using this software. |
