3. name and briefly describe five pre-writing activities that can you decide what to write about.

Five useful strategies are brainstorming, clustering, free writing, looping, and asking the six journalists' questions
brainstorming:
jot down all the possible terms that emerge from the general topic you are thinking about. this procedure works especially well if you work in a team. all team members can generate ideas, with one member acting as scribe. don't worry about editing or throwing out what might not be a good idea. simply write down a lot of possibilities.
group the items that you have listed according to arrangements that make sense to you.
give each group a label. now you have a topic with possible points of development.
write a sentence about the label you have given the group of ideas. now you have a topic sentence or possibly a thesis statement.
clustering: . clustering is also called mind mapping or idea mapping. it is a strategy that allows you to explore the relationships between ideas.

put the subject in the center of a page. circle or underline it.
as you think of other ideas, link the new ideas to the central circle with lines.
as you think of ideas that relate to the new ideas, add to those in the same way.
the result will look like a web on your page. locate clusters of interest to you, and use the terms you attached to the key ideas as departure points for your paper
free writing:
freewriting

free-writing is a process of generating a lot of information by writing non-stop. it allows you to focus on a specific topic, but forces you to write so quickly that you are unable to edit any of your ideas.

free-write on the assignment or general topic for several 5-10 minutes non-stop. force yourself to continue writing even if nothing specific comes to mind. this free-writing will include many ideas; at this point, generating ideas is what is important, not the grammar or the spelling.
after you've finished free-writing, look back over what you have written and highlight the most prominent and interesting ideas; then you can begin all over again, with a tighter focus. you will narrow your topic and, in the process, you will generate several relevant points about the topic.
looping: allows you to increasingly focus your ideas in trying to discover a writing topic. you loop one 5-10 minute free-writing after another, so you have a sequence of free-writings, each more specific than the other. the same rules that apply to free-writing apply to looping: write quickly, do not edit, and do not stop.

free-write on an assignment for 5-10 minutes. then, read through your free-writing, looking for interesting topics, ideas, phrases, or sentences. circle those you find interesting. a variation on looping is to have a classmate circle ideas in your free-writing that interests him or her.

then free-write again for 5-10 minutes on one of the circled topics. you should end up with a more specific free-writing about a particular topic.

loop your free-writing again, circling another interesting topic, idea, phrase, or sentence. when you have finished four or five rounds of looping, you will begin to have specific information that indicates what you are thinking about a particular topic. you may even have the basis for a tentative thesis or an improved idea for an approach to your assignment when you have finished.
journalist's questions:
when they are writing assignments, 5 w's and 1 h: who? , what? , where? , when? , why? , how? you can use these questions to explore the topic you are writing about for an assignment. a key to using the journalists' questions is to make them flexible enough to account for the specific details of your topic.

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