Organizing Your Writing: Clustering
Frank McCourt
Yeah, I'm list maker, I'm a kind of a guerilla writer. I set through all my material looking for an opening. And I get these large artist sketch pads. And I'll put down, uh, Mag Josey, he was a character, he's not in the book. He was a character in my childhood, Mag Josey. And I put down my mother, in the dispensary when she was on welfare, and make a circle. Put things in circles. I have this big page filled with circles. Then I extract some of the circles, and I put them on another page in clusters.

Akua Duku Anokye
Clustering and mapping come out of the whole thing about right brain, left brain. And I can never get which brain is which. But some of us learn graphically. Some of us need to see things and the mapping and the clustering allow us to see how those things are connected. So that rather than doing an outline, if you have an issue or an idea in the center of the board and then you start making lines off, what about this point and then lines off of that, showing connections, then some students are able to then make connections between ideas and ways that they weren't able to do it before.

Thomas Fox
If it's a narrative, and if your teacher gives you a lot of freedom, it might make sense to cluster, you know, what's the main event or the main character, what are all of the things that happened around that and try to organize it that way. But if you're at a place where you're doing a pretty structured research report, clustering might help, but at some point, you have to get those bubbles in line. You need to be able to start with one thing, go to the next thing, go to the next thing. So I really think that the kinds of organizational strategies used depend on the kind of writing you're doing.

John Lovas
Listing, for instance, I think is one of the most powerful techniques a writer can use, and it seems like a throw-away. Most people sort of say, "Make a list, big deal, anybody can make a list." Well that's exactly the power of it, is anybody can make a list. What it does is, without any great formal machinery, you sort of say, "Gee, I've been thinking about six things." So you quick jot them down in a word or a phrase or whatever form. Again what that does is it externalizes. You say, "OK, now I've got these seven things that I'm thinking about here." And it's extremely portable, you can make a list anywhere. You don't need a big piece of paper, you don't need a computer. You can do it on any of those, but just a little scrap of paper and something to write with and you can make a list.

Santi Buscemi
I do want them to have a skeleton of their essay once they finish their free writing. But then I tell them, this is not written in stone, this will change as you start to compose, as you start to put paragraphs together. You may think that point four, and you might, you know, if you're writing two days down the line, you may think that point four really should be point two. Make that change. You control the outline; the outline doesn't control you.

Betsy Klimasmith
If you take out all the evidence, all the facts, and you're left with a thesis statement and topic sentences, that is an outline. And an outline is a very good thing, whether you have your outline that you write beforehand or an outline—I would suggest that you do an outline after you've written the paper so that you know—and not necessarily using your topic sentences as the, you know, branches of the outline, but going back through each paragraph and saying OK, what did I really say here? Is it the same as the topic sentence that I wrote in my draft or did I develop my idea, did I think about it more thoroughly, did I get a better idea? And then that may mean rewriting topic sentences to fit the new ideas that you've come up with.