Doodling or Sketching

If you fill the margins of your notebooks with doodles, harness this artistic energy to generate ideas for writing. Elena Lopez began to sketch her collision with a teammate during a soccer tournament (Figure 19.1). She added stick figures, notes, symbols, and color as she outlined a series of events.

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FIGURE 19.1 Doodling or sketching to generate ideas

Try this advice as you develop ideas by doodling or sketching:

  1. Give your ideas room to grow. Open a new file using a drawing program, doodle in pencil on a blank page, or sketch on a series of pages.
  2. Concentrate on your topic, but welcome new ideas. Begin with a key visual in the center or at the top of a page. Add sketches or doodles as they occur to you to embellish, expand, define, or redirect your topic.
  3. Add icons, symbols, colors, figures, labels, notes, or questions. Freely mix visuals and text, recording ideas without stopping to refine them.
  4. Follow up on your discoveries. After a break, add notes to make connections, identify sequences, or convert visuals into descriptive sentences.