Inventing Toolbox

Questioning

Interview yourself about your paper. Start with the basics: What is your assignment? Who is your audience? Why do they care about this topic? Why do you care about this topic? What is your purpose? What do you already know and think about the topic? What do you guess? What do you want to know? What is your goal? What do you want to accomplish? At any point in the writing process, stopping to ask the reporter’s questions (who, what, when, where and especially why) can help you further develop your ideas. For more ideas about questions to ask yourself, see “Planning (Invention): Thought Starters (Asking the Right Questions)” from Purdue University.

 Listing

Listing is similar to freewriting.  Just make a list of every aspect of your topic that comes to mind.  Do not censor yourself or consider the applicability of anything that comes to your head -- keep your pen moving and see what you can come up with. Later, you can sort out the useful ideas from the junk.

 Talking

If you are a verbal person, use your strength. Discuss your assignment with others and see what ideas develop. After you talk your ideas out, ask the other person to tell you what they think you said and take notes. Some students even find it helpful to record their conversations with others about their papers.

 Interviewing

If you are very social and learn well from others, find people who know about your topic and ask them to relate their experiences. If you use information from them in your paper, remember to properly cite them as a source.

  Freewriting

Set a timer for ten or fifteen minutes and just start writing everything that comes to mind about your topic, without correcting or censoring your thoughts as they move from your head to the page.  The one rule in freewriting is that you need to keep your pen, pencil or fingers moving, even if you have to write “I’m stuck” over and over again. When the timer goes off, look back over what you have produced and see what patterns emerged in your writing. Freewriting can sometimes help you realize how much you already know about your topic and what about the topic interests you most. For more on freewriting and an interactive space for trying it out, visit “Getting Started: Freewriting” from Capital Community College. See "Write or Die: Putting the Prod in Productivity" for a great freewriting tool.

Heuristics

A heuristic is a tool that helps you think about a topic.  Heuristics get you thinking about important considerations like audience and purpose.  Purdue University excellent handouts filled with useful heuristics:

• “Prewriting Introduction”
• “Prewriting Questions”
• "More Prewriting Questions"

Try plugging your assignment into the questions that these pages offer to develop possible approaches to the material you will write on.

Mapping

Visual learners and relational thinkers tend to like mapping or diagramming their ideas. Many people find concept maps helpful. Individual and academic users can download concept map software from IHMC CmapTools. There are a variety of ways to brainstorm using graphical techniques such as clustering, fishbone and Venn diagrams. The Periodic Table of Visualization Methods has examples of many different graphical organizers.

 Outlining

If you are a very logical thinker, you may want to try outlining your ideas. Outlining is similar to listing but adds the step of organizing related and supporting ideas. It can be more or less formal, but provides you with a way to start sorting ideas into categories and deciding what supports what. “Using Outlines” from Indiana University describes how outlines can help you at each point in the writing process.

 Researching

Sometimes seeing what has already been written about your topic can help you collect your thoughts. However, be careful! Looking at what others have written before you have thought about your topic can lead to a boring, derivative paper and even to plagiarism if you become overwhelmed with everyone else’s ideas before giving yourself a chance to process your own. Make sure that, before you do any research, you have identified what you know and what you do not know, that you keep track of where your information comes from, and that as you research you keep reflecting upon your ideas and how they develop with the new information that you gather. Research at this initial stage should focus on giving you an overview of the topic, the experts in the field and the major issues.

Library Research:  The DePaul Libraries let you do much, if not all, of your research from your home PC, and their staff is always happy to help you find whatever you need. To contact them by phone, e-mail or IM, visit “Ask a Librarian.”  

Internet Research:  The Internet can be a valuable research tool if used properly. For advice on how to use the Internet to do college-level research, see “Finding Information on the Internet: A Tutorial."  But always remember that any outside information you use in your paper must be properly cited.  This page from Duke University explains the basics of MLA and APA citation.