6c Try drawing or creating word pictures.

If you‘re someone who prefers visual thinking, you might either create a drawing about the topic or use figurative language—such as similes and metaphors—to describe what the topic resembles. Working with pictures or verbal imagery can sometimes also help illuminate the topic or uncover some of your unconscious ideas or preconceptions about it.

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  1. If you like to draw, try sketching your topic. What images do you come up with? What details of the drawing attract you most? What would you most like to expand on? A student planning to write an essay on her college experience began by thinking with pencils and pen in hand. Soon she found that she had drawn a vending machine several times, with different products and different ways of inserting money to extract them (one of her drawings appears on the right). Her sketches led her to think about what it might mean to see an education as a product. Even abstract doodling can lead you to important insights about the topic and to focus your topic productively.
  2. Look for figurative language—metaphors and similes—that your topic resembles. Try jotting down three or four possibilities, beginning with “My subject is ” or “My subject is like .” A student working on the subject of genetically modified crops came up with this: “Genetically modified foods are like empty calories: they do more harm than good.” This exercise made one thing clear to this student writer: she already had a very strong bias that she would need to watch out for while developing her topic.

Play around a bit with your topic. Ask, for instance, “If my topic were a food (or a song or a movie or a video game), what would it be, and why?” Or write a Facebook status update about your topic, or send a tweet about why this topic appeals to you. Such exercises can get you out of the rut of everyday thinking and help you see your topic in a new light.

Using Your Native Language to Explore Ideas

FOR MULTILINGUAL WRITERS

For generating and exploring ideas—the work of much brainstorming, freewriting, looping, and clustering—you may be most successful at coming up with good ideas quickly and spontaneously if you work in your native language. Later in the process of writing, you can choose the best of these ideas and begin working with them in English.

Watch and respond to the video Getting ideas from social media.