What is the value?
It can be hugely intimidating for both the tutor and writer when a student arrives with nothing prepared. These brainstorming sessions can sometimes seem less valuable than other appointments because there is no material at hand. In actuality, they are an essential step to the writing process. Writers generally enter these sessions with a wealth of knowledge and information that they feel overwhelmed by or cannot organize. Through these conversations, the experience of vulnerability can be transformed into a literal “storm” of inspiration and creativity.
When a writer produces a draft with a mess of research and no sense of cohesion or direction, the essay may need more revision down the line. This can be avoided if ideas are generated and discussed before the essay even begins. Brainstorming will often remind writers that all of their points work together to support a larger argument; it encourages logical, purposeful writing.
Strategies
There are a multitude of different strategies that can be beneficial throughout a brainstorming appointment. The choice of strategy depends upon the modality, the writer, and the material at hand. Every appointment is unique, so there is not necessarily one best method.
Useful strategies include freewriting, listing, asking journalistic questions (Who, What, When, Where, How), and talking out loud. These strategies all require the tutor to ask purposeful, prompting questions of the writer and identify the most interesting or important ideas. Towards the end of the appointment, these ideas will be grouped, connected, and prioritized. This process is sometimes most visually apparent through the creation of a mind map, where the main idea is written in the center of a page and surrounded by all corresponding ideas, however random. The different thoughts can then be visually grouped into main ideas and subtopics that might eventually outline the body of a paper. Sometimes, brainstorming sessions don’t end in the creation of a thesis statement or argument, but rather a list of gaps in knowledge that need to be further researched.
On Freewriting
Freewriting is sometimes intimidating for tutors because it means that constant conversation is not occurring for the entirety of the appointment. Still, it has value because the tutor can encourage the writer to continue producing ideas for a given time window, even if the ideas generated seem absurd and unrelated. After freewriting, the tutor and the writer can highlight important or interesting claims and the pair can then further explore these. A useful form of this is called “looping”: a series of several 5-to-10 minute freewriting sessions that grow in specificity. After each time window, the best ideas are highlighted and further explored in the following freewrite. This activity can be conducted during an appointment or recommended as a next step.
So What?
It is highly important that writers understand that writing is a thinking process. They are never going to know everything their essay will explore before they actually begin writing. Essay drafts are living things; they are never a finished product. Writing Center appointments don’t necessarily give writers who enter with nothing a perfect, finished product. Rather, they approach the writing process as a series of steps and purposeful explorations that work together to develop the writing and the writer. Writers are therefore encouraged to follow up on these appointments throughout the writing process, as each step might require new feedback. These initial brainstorming appointments emphasize the idea that writers are capable of contributing truly valuable thoughts to the greater conversations they discuss in class, and the process of drafting will bring these thoughts to life.