For some students, coming up with ideas for writing feels impossible. And it can be just as challenging to teach the process effectively. For students who don’t know how to read, there are explicit strategies that they can work on repeatedly. With practice, these strategies will help them build their decoding and comprehension skills. But when it comes to writing, sometimes students just don’t know where to start. When this is the case, multiple examples don’t necessarily always help.
Brainstorming is a great first step for anyone who finds getting started a challenge. Brainstorming for writing can be done in a number of ways. They are a great way to generate ideas for topics. They can also be used to collect facts and questions around a topic that’s already been chosen. The beauty of brainstorms is that you don’t need any resources for them. All you need is the knowledge inside your head.
Brainstorming Ideas
This can work for both fiction and nonfiction, and for just about any writing purpose you can think of.
Fiction
The best place an author can gather ideas for a story is from their own life. If a student is having trouble generating details about a character, they can use friends and family as inspiration. Some authors even draw inspiration for their story characters by combining personality traits of multiple people they know. Students who have trouble imagining a fictional setting for their story can base it off of places they know well.
Basing fiction stories off of real life can make an author’s job much easier. It can be especially helpful for students who aren’t necessarily comfortable tapping into their imagination when writing.
Nonfiction
Some students have trouble choosing nonfiction topics they’d like to write about. In this case, the best place to start is to create a list of possible topics. Whether the assignment is to research an animal or a historical time period, this strategy can work for virtually any subject area. Once the student has created a substantial list, the next step would be to choose either the topic they are most interested in or the topic they know the most about. Preferably, they can find a topic that meets both criteria!
Brainstorming Content
Once students have chosen a topic for their nonfiction writing, an excellent next step is to generate questions to guide their research. A simple but effective way to do this is to create a KWL chart. A KWL chart has students brainstorm what they already know about a topic, what they want to know about the topic, and after doing some research, what they’ve learned about that topic. KWL charts are usually organized in three columns, but can be written in whatever way is conducive to the student’s process. The middle column, or what the student wants to know, should contain questions the student has about their topic.
Many students have trouble generating questions on their own. Gathering prior knowledge can stimulate curiosity and help students realize what they want to learn more about. This can be a helpful strategy for creating questions. Once a student has a few deep questions about their topic, the research process becomes much easier and more targeted.
The strategies above will not necessarily make a challenging process feel easier, but they can provide helpful steps for any student who feels paralyzed by a blank page.
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