Generating Ideas with Visuals and Paragraphing Control
Generating Ideas with Visuals
By Dave Gillespie
When you start any piece of writing, keep two rhetorical aspects firmly in mind: audience and purpose.
Every writing situation requires inquiry: What do the readers know? What evidence would best convince them? What genre fits the audience/purpose angle? What style? You would not want to cover “historical” information, for instance, if your reader already knows that material, so why spend time generating unnecessary content? If you are tasked to research the reasons for a particular problem, your paper had better not argue its solutions.
The least important (even useless) document is one that offers the reader gratuitous information.
Granted, everyone generates ideas differently, but most novice writers fail to create enough narrowed ideas, thus limiting their papers’ contents.
Whether you brainstorm (list ideas), free-write (continuous writing with no worry about grammar), talk, research, or use other ideas-generating tactics, spend plenty of time on this step. By experimenting with different strategies, you will generate more ideas and choices than necessary when planning your document’s content. In fact, try adding the following visuals strategies.