The Four Goals in Writing and How to Generate Ideas

In short essay writing, it is important to remember four goals or requirements that define the quality of its content. These goals include:unity, support, coherence, and sentence skills.

At school, we are usually given a set topic towrite, yet many students find it hard to come up with interesting ideas that they could explore in the topic. They just look at the questions without knowing what to write about. In fact, writing requires training, so is the generation of ideas. There are many ways to help students generate new ideas, one common method is clustering, or we can say, using a mind-map, or spider map. It offers a visual image of how ideas can be spread out while at the same time revolving a central topic.

You can start by writing the topic of your essay in the center of a piece of blank paper, and then give yourself a few minutes to do the free thinking. During this time, try to jot down any ideas that you can think of around the topic. Of course, there needs to be some kind of connection between the topic and the ideas. Connect them together with straight lines, thus making it look just like a spider web. Remember there are no right or wrong ideas. If you find a certain idea that is not going well with the topic, you can delete it anytime you wish. Doing the mind-map is an effective way to help people generate new thinking, expanding the topic. You can practice with the common topics you see in daily life and see how it ignites your imagination. When this done, you can go on with your task by connecting these ideas together via a logical order before embarking on the real writing part. 

Drawing a mind-map is a very effective way to help students bring up new ideas. Try to use the method by yourself, and see how you can spark your imagination with this wonderful method.