brainstorming ideas for writing essays

Brainstorming

What this handout is about.

This handout discusses techniques that will help you start writing a paper and continue writing through the challenges of the revising process. Brainstorming can help you choose a topic, develop an approach to a topic, or deepen your understanding of the topic’s potential.

Introduction

If you consciously take advantage of your natural thinking processes by gathering your brain’s energies into a “storm,” you can transform these energies into written words or diagrams that will lead to lively, vibrant writing. Below you will find a brief discussion of what brainstorming is, why you might brainstorm, and suggestions for how you might brainstorm.

Whether you are starting with too much information or not enough, brainstorming can help you to put a new writing task in motion or revive a project that hasn’t reached completion. Let’s take a look at each case:

When you’ve got nothing: You might need a storm to approach when you feel “blank” about the topic, devoid of inspiration, full of anxiety about the topic, or just too tired to craft an orderly outline. In this case, brainstorming stirs up the dust, whips some air into our stilled pools of thought, and gets the breeze of inspiration moving again.

When you’ve got too much: There are times when you have too much chaos in your brain and need to bring in some conscious order. In this case, brainstorming forces the mental chaos and random thoughts to rain out onto the page, giving you some concrete words or schemas that you can then arrange according to their logical relations.

Brainstorming techniques

What follows are great ideas on how to brainstorm—ideas from professional writers, novice writers, people who would rather avoid writing, and people who spend a lot of time brainstorming about…well, how to brainstorm.

Try out several of these options and challenge yourself to vary the techniques you rely on; some techniques might suit a particular writer, academic discipline, or assignment better than others. If the technique you try first doesn’t seem to help you, move right along and try some others.

Freewriting

When you freewrite, you let your thoughts flow as they will, putting pen to paper and writing down whatever comes into your mind. You don’t judge the quality of what you write and you don’t worry about style or any surface-level issues, like spelling, grammar, or punctuation. If you can’t think of what to say, you write that down—really. The advantage of this technique is that you free up your internal critic and allow yourself to write things you might not write if you were being too self-conscious.

When you freewrite you can set a time limit (“I’ll write for 15 minutes!”) and even use a kitchen timer or alarm clock or you can set a space limit (“I’ll write until I fill four full notebook pages, no matter what tries to interrupt me!”) and just write until you reach that goal. You might do this on the computer or on paper, and you can even try it with your eyes shut or the monitor off, which encourages speed and freedom of thought.

The crucial point is that you keep on writing even if you believe you are saying nothing. Word must follow word, no matter the relevance. Your freewriting might even look like this:

“This paper is supposed to be on the politics of tobacco production but even though I went to all the lectures and read the book I can’t think of what to say and I’ve felt this way for four minutes now and I have 11 minutes left and I wonder if I’ll keep thinking nothing during every minute but I’m not sure if it matters that I am babbling and I don’t know what else to say about this topic and it is rainy today and I never noticed the number of cracks in that wall before and those cracks remind me of the walls in my grandfather’s study and he smoked and he farmed and I wonder why he didn’t farm tobacco…”

When you’re done with your set number of minutes or have reached your page goal, read back over the text. Yes, there will be a lot of filler and unusable thoughts but there also will be little gems, discoveries, and insights. When you find these gems, highlight them or cut and paste them into your draft or onto an “ideas” sheet so you can use them in your paper. Even if you don’t find any diamonds in there, you will have either quieted some of the noisy chaos or greased the writing gears so that you can now face the assigned paper topic.

Break down the topic into levels

Once you have a course assignment in front of you, you might brainstorm:

• the general topic, like “The relationship between tropical fruits and colonial powers”
• a specific subtopic or required question, like “How did the availability of multiple tropical fruits influence competition amongst colonial powers trading from the larger Caribbean islands during the 19th century?”
• a single term or phrase that you sense you’re overusing in the paper. For example: If you see that you’ve written “increased the competition” about a dozen times in your “tropical fruits” paper, you could brainstorm variations on the phrase itself or on each of the main terms: “increased” and “competition.”

Listing/bulleting

In this technique you jot down lists of words or phrases under a particular topic. You can base your list on:

• the general topic
• one or more words from your particular thesis claim
• a word or idea that is the complete opposite of your original word or idea.

For example, if your general assignment is to write about the changes in inventions over time, and your specific thesis claims that “the 20th century presented a large number of inventions to advance US society by improving upon the status of 19th-century society,” you could brainstorm two different lists to ensure you are covering the topic thoroughly and that your thesis will be easy to prove.

The first list might be based on your thesis; you would jot down as many 20th-century inventions as you could, as long as you know of their positive effects on society. The second list might be based on the opposite claim, and you would instead jot down inventions that you associate with a decline in that society’s quality. You could do the same two lists for 19th-century inventions and then compare the evidence from all four lists.

Using multiple lists will help you to gather more perspective on the topic and ensure that, sure enough, your thesis is solid as a rock, or, …uh oh, your thesis is full of holes and you’d better alter your claim to one you can prove.

3 perspectives

Looking at something from different perspectives helps you see it more completely—or at least in a completely different way, sort of like laying on the floor makes your desk look very different to you. To use this strategy, answer the questions for each of the three perspectives, then look for interesting relationships or mismatches you can explore:

• Describe it: Describe your subject in detail. What is your topic? What are its components? What are its interesting and distinguishing features? What are its puzzles? Distinguish your subject from those that are similar to it. How is your subject unlike others?
• Trace it: What is the history of your subject? How has it changed over time? Why? What are the significant events that have influenced your subject?
• Map it: What is your subject related to? What is it influenced by? How? What does it influence? How? Who has a stake in your topic? Why? What fields do you draw on for the study of your subject? Why? How has your subject been approached by others? How is their work related to yours?

Cubing enables you to consider your topic from six different directions; just as a cube is six-sided, your cubing brainstorming will result in six “sides” or approaches to the topic. Take a sheet of paper, consider your topic, and respond to these six commands:

• Describe it.
• Compare it.
• Associate it.
• Analyze it.
• Argue for and against it.

Look over what you’ve written. Do any of the responses suggest anything new about your topic? What interactions do you notice among the “sides”? That is, do you see patterns repeating, or a theme emerging that you could use to approach the topic or draft a thesis? Does one side seem particularly fruitful in getting your brain moving? Could that one side help you draft your thesis statement? Use this technique in a way that serves your topic. It should, at least, give you a broader awareness of the topic’s complexities, if not a sharper focus on what you will do with it.

In this technique, complete the following sentence:

____________________ is/was/are/were like _____________________.

In the first blank put one of the terms or concepts your paper centers on. Then try to brainstorm as many answers as possible for the second blank, writing them down as you come up with them.

After you have produced a list of options, look over your ideas. What kinds of ideas come forward? What patterns or associations do you find?

Clustering/mapping/webbing:

The general idea:

This technique has three (or more) different names, according to how you describe the activity itself or what the end product looks like. In short, you will write a lot of different terms and phrases onto a sheet of paper in a random fashion and later go back to link the words together into a sort of “map” or “web” that forms groups from the separate parts. Allow yourself to start with chaos. After the chaos subsides, you will be able to create some order out of it.

To really let yourself go in this brainstorming technique, use a large piece of paper or tape two pieces together. You could also use a blackboard if you are working with a group of people. This big vertical space allows all members room to “storm” at the same time, but you might have to copy down the results onto paper later. If you don’t have big paper at the moment, don’t worry. You can do this on an 8 ½ by 11 as well. Watch our short videos on webbing , drawing relationships , and color coding for demonstrations.

How to do it:

• Take your sheet(s) of paper and write your main topic in the center, using a word or two or three.
• Moving out from the center and filling in the open space any way you are driven to fill it, start to write down, fast, as many related concepts or terms as you can associate with the central topic. Jot them quickly, move into another space, jot some more down, move to another blank, and just keep moving around and jotting. If you run out of similar concepts, jot down opposites, jot down things that are only slightly related, or jot down your grandpa’s name, but try to keep moving and associating. Don’t worry about the (lack of) sense of what you write, for you can chose to keep or toss out these ideas when the activity is over.
• Once the storm has subsided and you are faced with a hail of terms and phrases, you can start to cluster. Circle terms that seem related and then draw a line connecting the circles. Find some more and circle them and draw more lines to connect them with what you think is closely related. When you run out of terms that associate, start with another term. Look for concepts and terms that might relate to that term. Circle them and then link them with a connecting line. Continue this process until you have found all the associated terms. Some of the terms might end up uncircled, but these “loners” can also be useful to you. (Note: You can use different colored pens/pencils/chalk for this part, if you like. If that’s not possible, try to vary the kind of line you use to encircle the topics; use a wavy line, a straight line, a dashed line, a dotted line, a zigzaggy line, etc. in order to see what goes with what.)
• There! When you stand back and survey your work, you should see a set of clusters, or a big web, or a sort of map: hence the names for this activity. At this point you can start to form conclusions about how to approach your topic. There are about as many possible results to this activity as there are stars in the night sky, so what you do from here will depend on your particular results. Let’s take an example or two in order to illustrate how you might form some logical relationships between the clusters and loners you’ve decided to keep. At the end of the day, what you do with the particular “map” or “cluster set” or “web” that you produce depends on what you need. What does this map or web tell you to do? Explore an option or two and get your draft going!

Relationship between the parts

In this technique, begin by writing the following pairs of terms on opposite margins of one sheet of paper:

Looking over these four groups of pairs, start to fill in your ideas below each heading. Keep going down through as many levels as you can. Now, look at the various parts that comprise the parts of your whole concept. What sorts of conclusions can you draw according to the patterns, or lack of patterns, that you see? For a related strategy, watch our short video on drawing relationships .

Journalistic questions

In this technique you would use the “big six” questions that journalists rely on to thoroughly research a story. The six are: Who?, What?, When?, Where?, Why?, and How?. Write each question word on a sheet of paper, leaving space between them. Then, write out some sentences or phrases in answer, as they fit your particular topic. You might also record yourself or use speech-to-text if you’d rather talk out your ideas.

Now look over your batch of responses. Do you see that you have more to say about one or two of the questions? Or, are your answers for each question pretty well balanced in depth and content? Was there one question that you had absolutely no answer for? How might this awareness help you to decide how to frame your thesis claim or to organize your paper? Or, how might it reveal what you must work on further, doing library research or interviews or further note-taking?

For example, if your answers reveal that you know a lot more about “where” and “why” something happened than you know about “what” and “when,” how could you use this lack of balance to direct your research or to shape your paper? How might you organize your paper so that it emphasizes the known versus the unknown aspects of evidence in the field of study? What else might you do with your results?

Thinking outside the box

Even when you are writing within a particular academic discipline, you can take advantage of your semesters of experience in other courses from other departments. Let’s say you are writing a paper for an English course. You could ask yourself, “Hmmm, if I were writing about this very same topic in a biology course or using this term in a history course, how might I see or understand it differently? Are there varying definitions for this concept within, say, philosophy or physics, that might encourage me to think about this term from a new, richer point of view?”

For example, when discussing “culture” in your English, communications, or cultural studies course, you could incorporate the definition of “culture” that is frequently used in the biological sciences. Remember those little Petri dishes from your lab experiments in high school? Those dishes are used to “culture” substances for bacterial growth and analysis, right? How might it help you write your paper if you thought of “culture” as a medium upon which certain things will grow, will develop in new ways or will even flourish beyond expectations, but upon which the growth of other things might be retarded, significantly altered, or stopped altogether?

Using charts or shapes

If you are more visually inclined, you might create charts, graphs, or tables in lieu of word lists or phrases as you try to shape or explore an idea. You could use the same phrases or words that are central to your topic and try different ways to arrange them spatially, say in a graph, on a grid, or in a table or chart. You might even try the trusty old flow chart. The important thing here is to get out of the realm of words alone and see how different spatial representations might help you see the relationships among your ideas. If you can’t imagine the shape of a chart at first, just put down the words on the page and then draw lines between or around them. Or think of a shape. Do your ideas most easily form a triangle? square? umbrella? Can you put some ideas in parallel formation? In a line?

Consider purpose and audience

Think about the parts of communication involved in any writing or speaking act: purpose and audience.

What is your purpose?

What are you trying to do? What verb captures your intent? Are you trying to inform? Convince? Describe? Each purpose will lead you to a different set of information and help you shape material to include and exclude in a draft. Write about why you are writing this draft in this form. For more tips on figuring out the purpose of your assignment, see our handout on understanding assignments .

Who is your audience?

Who are you communicating with beyond the grader? What does that audience need to know? What do they already know? What information does that audience need first, second, third? Write about who you are writing to and what they need. For more on audience, see our  handout on audience .

Dictionaries, thesauruses, encyclopedias

When all else fails…this is a tried and true method, loved for centuries by writers of all stripe. Visit the library reference areas or stop by the Writing Center to browse various dictionaries, thesauruses (or other guide books and reference texts), encyclopedias or surf their online counterparts. Sometimes these basic steps are the best ones. It is almost guaranteed that you’ll learn several things you did not know.

If you’re looking at a hard copy reference, turn to your most important terms and see what sort of variety you find in the definitions. The obscure or archaic definition might help you to appreciate the term’s breadth or realize how much its meaning has changed as the language changed. Could that realization be built into your paper somehow?

If you go to online sources, use their own search functions to find your key terms and see what suggestions they offer. For example, if you plug “good” into a thesaurus search, you will be given 14 different entries. Whew! If you were analyzing the film Good Will Hunting, imagine how you could enrich your paper by addressed the six or seven ways that “good” could be interpreted according to how the scenes, lighting, editing, music, etc., emphasized various aspects of “good.”

An encyclopedia is sometimes a valuable resource if you need to clarify facts, get quick background, or get a broader context for an event or item. If you are stuck because you have a vague sense of a seemingly important issue, do a quick check with this reference and you may be able to move forward with your ideas.

Armed with a full quiver of brainstorming techniques and facing sheets of jotted ideas, bulleted subtopics, or spidery webs relating to your paper, what do you do now?

Take the next step and start to write your first draft, or fill in those gaps you’ve been brainstorming about to complete your “almost ready” paper. If you’re a fan of outlining, prepare one that incorporates as much of your brainstorming data as seems logical to you. If you’re not a fan, don’t make one. Instead, start to write out some larger chunks (large groups of sentences or full paragraphs) to expand upon your smaller clusters and phrases. Keep building from there into larger sections of your paper. You don’t have to start at the beginning of the draft. Start writing the section that comes together most easily. You can always go back to write the introduction later.

We also have helpful handouts on some of the next steps in your writing process, such as reorganizing drafts and argument .

Remember, once you’ve begun the paper, you can stop and try another brainstorming technique whenever you feel stuck. Keep the energy moving and try several techniques to find what suits you or the particular project you are working on.

How can technology help?

Need some help brainstorming? Different digital tools can help with a variety of brainstorming strategies:

Look for a text editor that has a focus mode or that is designed to promote free writing (for examples, check out FocusWriter, OmmWriter, WriteRoom, Writer the Internet Typewriter, or Cold Turkey). Eliminating visual distractions on your screen can help you free write for designated periods of time. By eliminating visual distractions on your screen, these tools help you focus on free writing for designated periods of time. If you use Microsoft Word, you might even try “Focus Mode” under the “View” tab.

Clustering/mapping. Websites and applications like Mindomo , TheBrain , and Miro allow you to create concept maps and graphic organizers. These applications often include the following features:

• Connect links, embed documents and media, and integrate notes in your concept maps
• Access your maps across devices
• Search across maps for keywords
• Convert maps into checklists and outlines
• Export maps to other file formats

Testimonials

Check out what other students and writers have tried!

Papers as Puzzles : A UNC student demonstrates a brainstorming strategy for getting started on a paper.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Allen, Roberta, and Marcia Mascolini. 1997. The Process of Writing: Composing Through Critical Thinking . Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Cameron, Julia. 2002. The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity . New York: Putnam.

Goldberg, Natalie. 2005. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within , rev. ed. Boston: Shambhala.

Rosen, Leonard J. and Laurence Behrens. 2003. The Allyn & Bacon Handbook , 5th ed. New York: Longman.

University of Richmond. n.d. “Main Page.” Writer’s Web. Accessed June 14, 2019. http://writing2.richmond.edu/writing/wweb.html .

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The Writing Process

Making expository writing less stressful, more efficient, and more enlightening, search form, you are here.

• Step 1: Generate Ideas

Brainstorming

"It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to always be right by having no ideas at all." —Edward de Bono

Most people have been taught how to brainstorm, but review these instructions to make sure you understand all aspects of it.

• Don't write in complete sentences, just words and phrases, and don't worry about grammar or even spelling;
• Again, do NOT judge or skip any idea, no matter how silly or crazy it may initially seem; you can decide later which ones are useful and which are not, but if you judge now, you may miss a great idea or connection;
• Do this for 15, 20, or (if you're on a roll) even 30 minutes--basically until you think you have enough material to start organizing or, if needed, doing research.

Below is a sample brainstorm for an argument/research paper on the need for a defense shield around the earth:

Photo: "Brainstorm" ©2007 Jonathan Aguila

Home / Guides / Writing Guides / Writing Tips / How to Brainstorm for an Essay

How to Brainstorm for an Essay

Once you get going on a paper, you can often get into a groove and churn out the bulk of it fairly quickly. But choosing or brainstorming a topic for a paper—especially one with an open-ended prompt—can often be a challenge.

You’ve probably been told to brainstorm ideas for papers since you were in elementary school. Even though you might feel like “brainstorming” is an ineffective method for actually figuring out what to write about, it really works. Everyone thinks through ideas differently, but here are some tips to help you brainstorm more effectively regardless of what learning style works best for you:

Tip #1: Set an end goal for yourself

Develop a goal for your brainstorm. Don’t worry—you can go into brainstorming without knowing exactly what you want to write about, but you should  have an idea of what you hope to gain from your brainstorming session. Do you want to develop a list of potential topics? Do you want to come up with ideas to support an argument? Have some idea about what you want to get out of brainstorming so that you can make more effective use of your time.

Tip #2: Write down all ideas

Sure, some of your ideas will be better than others, but you should write all of them down for you to look back on later. Starting with bad or infeasible ideas might seem counterintuitive, but one idea usually leads to another one. Make a list that includes all of your initial thoughts, and then you can go back through and pick out the best one later. Passing judgment on ideas in this first stage will just slow you down.

Tip #3: Think about what interests you most

Students usually write better essays when they’re exploring subjects that they have some personal interest in. If a professor gives you an open-ended prompt, take it as an opportunity to delve further into a topic you find more interesting. When trying to find a focus for your papers, think back on coursework that you found engaging or that raised further questions for you.

Tip #4: Consider what you want the reader to get from your paper

Do you want to write an engaging piece? A thought-provoking one? An informative one? Think about the end goal of your writing while you go through the initial brainstorming process. Although this might seem counterproductive, considering what you want readers to get out of your writing can help you come up with a focus that both satisfies your readers and satisfies you as a writer.

 Tip #5: Try freewriting

Write for five minutes on a topic of your choice that you think could  be worth pursuing—your idea doesn’t have to be fully fleshed out. This can help you figure out whether it’s worth putting more time into an idea or if it doesn’t really have any weight to it. If you find that you don’t have much to say about a particular topic, you can switch subjects halfway through writing, but this can be a good way to get your creative juices flowing.

Tip #6: Draw a map of your ideas

While some students might prefer the more traditional list methods, for more visual learners, sketching out a word map of ideas may be a useful method for brainstorming. Write the main idea in a circle in the center of your page. Then, write smaller, related ideas in bubbles further from the center of the page and connect them to your initial idea using lines. This is a good way to break down big ideas and to figure out whether they are worth writing about.

 Tip #7: Enlist the help of others

Sometimes it can be difficult coming up with paper topics on your own, and family and friends can prove to be valuable resources when developing ideas. Feel free to brainstorm with another person (or in a group). Many hands make light work—and some students work best when thinking through ideas out loud—so don’t be afraid to ask others for advice when trying to come up with a paper topic.

Tip #8: Find the perfect brainstorming spot

Believe it or not, location can make a BIG difference when you’re trying to come up with a paper topic. Working while watching TV is never a good idea, but you might want to listen to music while doing work, or you might prefer to sit in a quiet study location. Think about where you work best, and pick a spot where you feel that you can be productive.

Tip #9: Play word games to help generate ideas

Whether you hate playing word games or think they’re a ton of fun, you might want to try your hand at a quick round of Words With Friends or a game of Scrabble. These games can help get your brain working, and sometimes ideas can be triggered by words you see. Get a friend to play an old-fashioned board game with you, or try your hand at a mobile app if you’re in a time crunch.

Tip #10: Take a break to let ideas sink in

Brainstorming is a great way to get all of your initial thoughts out there, but sometimes you need a bit more time to process all of those ideas. Stand up and stretch—or even take a walk around the block—and then look back on your list of ideas to see if you have any new thoughts on them.

For many students, the most difficult process of paper writing is simply coming up with an idea about what to write on. Don’t be afraid to get all of your ideas out there through brainstorming, and remember that all ideas are valid. Take the time necessary to sort through all of your ideas, using whatever method works best for you, and then get to writing—but don’t be afraid to go back to the drawing board if a new inspiration strikes.

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Writing Studio

Invention (aka brainstorming), what is “invention”.

In an effort to make our handouts more accessible, we have begun converting our PDF handouts to web pages. Download this page as a PDF: Invention Return to Writing Studio Handouts

Invention (also referred to as brainstorming) is the stage of the writing process during which writers discover the ideas upon which their essays will focus. During this stage, writers tend to overcome some of the anxiety they might have about writing a paper, and in many cases, actually become excited about it. Although invention usually occurs at the beginning of the writing process, exercises aimed at facilitating invention can be helpful at many stages of writing. Some of the best writers return to this stage a number of times while composing drafts of their essays.

Recommended Invention Techniques

Freewriting.

Read through your assignment and choose a topic, theme, or question that comes to mind. Write for 10-15 minutes in response to this idea – do not lift your pen from the paper or your hands from the keyboard.

When you are finished, read through your draft and underline or circle ideas that might lead you to a thesis for your paper. Consider asking a classmate or friend to read what you’ve written and ask questions about your ideas and topics.

After freewriting, read through what you have written and underline a phrase or sentence that you think is particularly effective or that expresses your ideas most clearly. Write this at the top of a new sheet of paper and use it to guide a new freewrite.

Repeat this process several times. The more you write and select, the more you will be able to refine your ideas.

Talk to Yourself

Some people often find themselves saying, “I know what I want to say. It’s just that I can’t figure out how to put it in writing.” If this is the case for you, try dictating your thoughts on a digital recording device. After several minutes, listen to what you’ve recorded and write down ideas you want to incorporate into your paper.

If you don’t have a recording device, ask a friend to write down some of the main points you make as you talk about your ideas.

List all the ideas you can think of that are connected to the topic or the subject you want to explore. Consider any idea or observation as valid and worthy of listing (go for quantity at this point). List quickly and then set your list aside for a few minutes. Come back and read your list and then do the listing exercise again.

Using Charts or Shapes

Use phrases or words that are central to your topic and try to arrange them spatially in a graph, grid, table, or chart. How do the different spatial representations help you see the relationships among your ideas? If you can’t imagine the shape of a chart at first, just put the words on a page and draw lines between or around them.

Break Down the Assignment

Sometimes prompts are so complicated that they can seem overwhelming. Students often ask: There’s so much to do, where should I start? Try to break the assignment down into its constituent parts:

• The general topic, like “The relationship between tropical fruits and colonial powers.”
• A specific subtopic or required question, like “How did the availability of multiple tropical fruits influence competition among colonial powers trading from the larger Caribbean islands during the 19th century?”
• A single term or phrase that seems to repeat in the material you’ve read or the ideas you’ve been considering. For example, if have you seen the words “increased competition” several times in the class materials you’ve been reading about tropical fruit exports, you could brainstorm variations on the phrase within the context of those readings or focus on variations of each component of the phrase (i.e., “increased” and “competition”).

Once you have identified the major parts of the topic, try to figure out what you are being asked to think about in the assignment. What questions are you expected to answer? Are there related questions that need to be addressed in order to answer the primary questions? If so, what are they?

Defining Terms

In your own words, write definitions for key terms or concepts given in the assignment. Find other definitions of those terms in your course readings, the dictionary, or through conversations and then compare the definitions to your own. Keep these definitions in mind as you begin to write your essay.

Summarizing Positions

Summarize the positions of relevant authors from your course readings or research. Do you agree or disagree with their ideas, methods, or approaches? How do your interests overlap with the positions of the authors in question? Try to be brief in your descriptions. Write a paragraph or up to a page describing a reading or a position.

Get together with a group of classmates and have each person write down her or his tentative topic or thesis at the top of a blank sheet of paper. Pass the sheets around from left to right so that each person can write down a thoughtful question or suggest related ideas to think about.

Compare / Contrast Matrix

If your assignment asks you to compare or contrast two concepts, texts, subjects, etc., try to organize your thoughts in a compare/contrast matrix by focusing on the attributes you will consider in your draft. These attributes should establish the key points of comparison or contrast with which you will deal in your essay.

Last revised: 07/2008 | Adapted for web delivery: 05/2021

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College admissions

Course: college admissions   >   unit 4.

• Writing a strong college admissions essay
• Avoiding common admissions essay mistakes

Brainstorming tips for your college essay

• How formal should the tone of your college essay be?
• Taking your college essay to the next level
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Video transcript

How to Brainstorming Essays with 100+ Ideas in 2024

Anh Vu • 03 April, 2024 • 10 min read

We have all been there. Teachers assign us an essay due next week. We tremble. What should we write about? What problems to tackle? Would the essay be original enough? So, how do we brainstorming essays ?

It’s like you are venturing into an unexplored abyss. But fret not, because making a brainstorm for essay writing can actually help you plan, execute and nail that A+

Here’s how to brainstorm for essays …

Table of Contents

Engagement tips with ahaslides.

• What is brainstorming?
• Write ideas unconsciously
• Draw a mind map
• Get on Pinterest
• Try a Venn Diagram
• Use a T-Chart
• Online tools
• More AhaSlides Tools
• 14 brainstorming rules to Help You Craft Creative Ideas in 2024
• 10 brainstorm questions for School and Work in 2024

Easy Brainstorm Templates

Get free brainstorming templates today! Sign up for free and take what you want from the template library!

What is Brainstorming?

Every successful creation starts with a great idea, which is actually the hardest part in many cases.

Brainstorming is simply the free-flowing process of coming up with ideas. In this process, you come up with a whole bunch of ideas without guilt or shame . Ideas can be outside of the box and nothing is considered too silly, too complex, or impossible. The more creative and free-flowing, the better.

The benefits of brainstorming can surprise you:

• Increases your creativity : Brainstorming forces your mind to research and come up with possibilities, even unthinkable ones. Thus, it opens your mind to new ideas.
• A valuable skill: Not just in high school or college, brainstorming is a lifelong skill in your employment and pretty much anything that requires a bit of thought.
• Helps organise your essay : At any point in the essay you can stop to brainstorm ideas. This helps you structure the essay, making it coherent and logical.
• It can calm you: A lot of the stress in writing comes from not having enough ideas or not having a structure. You might feel overwhelmed by the hoards of information after the initial research. Brainstorming ideas can help organise your thoughts, which is a calming activity that can help you avoid stress.

Essay brainstorming in an academic setting works a bit differently than doing it in a team. You’ll be the only one doing the brainstorming for your essay, meaning that you’ll be coming up with and whittling down the ideas yourself.

Learn to use idea board to generate ideas effectively with AhaSlides

Here are five ways to do just that…

Brainstorming Essays – 5 Ideas

Idea #1 – write ideas unconsciously.

In “ Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking ,” Malcolm Gladwell points out how our unconscious is many times more effective than our conscious in decision-making.

In brainstorming, our unconscious can differentiate between relevant and irrelevant information in a split second. Our intuition is underrated. It can often produce better judgments than a deliberate and thoughtful analysis as it cuts through all the irrelevant information and focuses on just the key factors. 

Even if the ideas you come up with in essay brainstorming seem insignificant, they might lead you to something great later. Trust yourself and put whatever you think of on paper; if you don’t focus on self-editing, you may come up with some ingenious ideas.

That’s because writing freely can actually negate writer’s block and help your unconscious run wild!

Idea #2 – Draw a Mind Map

Brains love visual communication and mind maps are exactly that.

Our thoughts rarely arrive in easily digestible chunks; they’re more like webs of information and ideas that extend forward at any given time. Keeping track of these ideas is tough, but manifesting them all in a mind map can help you get more ideas and both understand and retain them better.

To draw an effective mind map, here are some tips:

• Create a central idea : In the middle of your paper draw a central topic/idea which represents the starting point of your essay and then branch out to different arguments. This central visual will act as visual stimulus to trigger your brain and remind you constantly about the core idea.
• Add keywords : When you add branches to your mind map, you will need to include a key idea. Keep these phrases as brief as possible to generate a greater number of associations and keep space for more detailed branches and thoughts.
• Highlight branches in different colours : Coloured pen is your best friend. Apply different colours to each key idea branch above. This way, you can differentiate arguments.
• Use visual signifiers : Since visuals and colours are the core of a mind map, use them as much as you can. Drawing small doodles works great because it mimics how our mind unconsciously arrives at ideas. Alternatively, if you’re using an online brainstorming tool , you can real images and embed them in.

Idea #3 – Get on Pinterest

Believe it or not, Pinterest is actually a pretty decent online brainstorming tool. You can use it to collect images and ideas from other people and put them all together to get a clearer picture of what your essay should talk about.

For example, if you’re writing an essay on the importance of college, you could write something like Does college matter? in the search bar. You might just find a bunch of interesting infographics and perspectives that you never even considered before.

Save that to your own idea board and repeat the process a few more times. Before you know it, you’ll have a cluster of ideas that can really help you shape your essay!

Idea #4 – Try a Venn Diagram

Are you trying to find similarities between two topics? Then the famous Venn diagram technique could be the key, as it clearly visualises the characteristics of any concept and shows you which parts overlap.

Popularised by British Mathematician John Venn in the 1880s, the diagram traditionally illustrates simple set relationships in probability, logic, statistics, linguistics and computer science.

You start by drawing two (or more) intersecting circles and labelling each one with an idea you’re thinking of. Write the qualities of each idea in their own circles, and the ideas they share in the middle where the circles intersect.

For example, in the student debate topic Marijuana should be legal because alcohol is , you can have a circle listing the positives and negatives of marijuana, the other circle doing the same for alcohol, and the middle ground listing the effects they share between them.

Idea #5 – Use a T-Chart

This brainstorming technique works well to compare and contrast, thanks to the fact that it’s super simple.

All you have to do is write the title of the essay at the top of your paper then split the rest of it into two. On the left side, you’ll write about the argument for and on the right side, you’ll write about the argument against .

For example, in the topic Should plastic bags be banned? you can write the pros in the left column and the cons in the right. Similarly, if you’re writing about a character from fiction, you can use the left column for their positive traits and the right side for their negative traits. Simple as that.

💡 Need more? Check out our article on How to Brainstorm Ideas Properly !

Online Tools to Brainstorm for Essays

Thanks to technology, we no longer have to rely on just a piece of paper and a pen. There are a plethora of tools, paid and free, to make your virtual brainstorming session easier…

• Freemind is a free, downloadable software for mind mapping. You can brainstorm an essay using different colours to show which parts of the article you’re referring to. The color-coded features keep track of your essays as you write.
• MindGenius is another app where you can curate and customise your own mind map from an array of templates.
• AhaSlides is a free tool for brainstorming with others. If you’re working on a team essay, you can ask everyone to write down their ideas for the topic and then vote on whichever is their favourite.
• Miro is a wonderful tool for visualising pretty much anything with a lot of moving parts. It gives you an infinite board and every arrow shape under the sun to construct and align the parts of your essay.

More AhaSlides Tools to Make your Brainstorming Sessions Better!

• Use AhaSlides Live Word Cloud Generator to gather more ideas from your crowds and classrooms!
• Host Free Live Q&A to gain more insights from the crowd!
• Gamify engagement with a spin the wheel ! It’s a fun and interactive way to boost participation
• Instead of boring MCQ questions, learn how to use online quiz creator now!
• Random your team to gain more fun with AhaSlides random team generator !

Final Say on Brainstorming Essays

Honestly, the scariest moment of writing an essay is before you start but brainstorming for essays before can really make the process of writing an essay less scary. It’s a process that helps you burst through one of the toughest parts of essay and writing and gets your creative juices flowing for the content ahead.

💡 Besides brainstorming essays, are you still looking for brainstorming activities? Try some of these !

Tips to Engage with Polls & Trivia

More from AhaSlides

Generating Ideas for Your Paper

• Introduction

Good writing requires good ideas—intriguing concepts and analysis that are clearly and compellingly arranged. But good ideas don’t just appear like magic. All writers struggle with figuring out what they are going to say. And while there is no set formula for generating ideas for your writing, there is a wide range of established techniques that can help you get started.

This page contains information about those techniques. Here you’ll find details about specific ways to develop thoughts and foster inspiration. While many writers employ one or two of these strategies at the beginning of their writing processes in order to come up with their overall topic or argument, these techniques can also be used any time you’re trying to figure out how to effectively achieve any of your writing goals or even just when you’re not sure what to say next.

What is Invention?

Where do ideas come from? This is a high-level question worthy of a fascinating TED Talk or a Smithsonian article , but it also represents one of the primary challenges of writing. How do we figure out WHAT to write?

Even hundreds of years ago, people knew that a text begins with an idea and that locating this idea and determining how to develop it requires work. According to classical understandings of rhetoric, the first step of building an argument is invention. As Roman thinker Cicero argued, people developing arguments “ought first to find out what [they] should say” ( On Oratory and Orators 3.31). Two hundred years before Cicero, the Greek philosopher Aristotle detailed a list of more than two dozen ideas a rhetor might consider when figuring out what to say about a given topic ( On Rhetoric , 2.23). For example, Aristotle suggested that a good place to start is to define your key concepts, to think about how your topic compares to other topics, or to identify its causes and effects. (For ideas about using Aristotle’s advice to generate ideas for your own papers, check out this recommended technique .)

More recently, composition scholar Joseph Harris has identified three values important for writers just starting a project. Writers at early stages in their writing process can benefit from being: Receptive to unexpected connections You never know when something you read or need to write will remind you of that movie you watched last weekend or that anthropology theory you just heard a lecture about or that conversation you had with a member of your lab about some unexpected data you’ve encountered. Sometimes these connections will jump out at you in the moment or you’ll suddenly remember them while you’re vacuuming the living room. Harris validates the importance of “seizing hold of those ideas that do somehow come to you” (102). While you can’t count on these kinds of serendipities, be open to them when they occur. Be ready to stop and jot them down! Patient Harris supports the value of patience and “the usefulness of boredom, of letting ideas percolate” (102). It can take time and long consideration to think of something new. When possible, give yourself plenty of time so that your development of ideas is not stifled by an immediate due date. Compelled by the unknown According to Harris, “a writer often needs to start not from a moment of inspiration ( eureka! ) but from the need to work through a conceptual problem or roadblock. Indeed, I’d suggest that most academic writing begins with such questions rather than insights, with difficulties in understanding rather than moments of mastery” (102). Sometimes a very good place to begin is with what you don’t know, with the questions and curiosities that you genuinely want resolved.

In what follows, we describe ten techniques that you can select from and experiment with to help guide your invention processes. Depending on your writing preferences, context, and audience, you might find some more productive than others. Also, it might be useful to utilize various techniques for different purposes. For example, brainstorming might be great for generating a variety of possible ideas, but looped freewriting might help you develop those ideas. Think of this list as a collection of recommended possibilities to implement at your discretion. However, we think the first technique described below—“Analyzing the Assignment or Task”—is a great starting point for all writers.

Any of these strategies can be useful for generating ideas in connection to any writing assignment. Even if the paper you’re writing has a set structure (e.g., scientific reports’ IMRAD format or some philosophy assignments’ prescribed argumentative sequence), you still have to invent and organize concepts and supporting evidence within each section. Additionally, these techniques can be used at any stage in your writing process. Your ideas change and develop as you write, and sometimes when you’re in the middle of a draft or when you’re embarking on a major revision, you find yourself rethinking key elements of your paper. At these moments, it might be useful to turn to some of these invention techniques as a way to slow down and capture the ephemeral thoughts and possibilities swirling around your writing tasks. These practices can help guide you to new ideas, questions, and connections. No matter what you’re writing or where you are in the process, we encourage you to experiment with invention strategies you may not have tried before. Mix and match. Be as creative and adventurous with how you generate ideas just as you are creative and adventurous with what ideas you generate.

Some Invention Techniques

Analyzing the assignment or task.

What do I do? If you are writing a paper in response to a course instructor’s assignment, be sure to read the prompt carefully while paying particular attention to all of its requirements and expectations. It could be that the assignment is built around a primary question; if so, structure your initial thoughts around possible answers to that question. If it isn’t, use your close consideration of this assignment to recast the prompt as a question.

The following list of questions are ones that you can ask of the assignment in order to understand its focus and purpose as well as to begin developing ideas for how to effectively respond to its intensions. You may want to underline key terms and record your answers to these questions:

• When is this due?
• How long is supposed to be?
• Is the topic given to me?
• If I get to choose my topic, are there any stipulations about the kind of topic and I can choose?
• What am I expected to do with this topic? Analyze it? Report about it? Make an argument about it? Compare it to something else?
• Who is my audience and what does this audience know, believe, and value about my topic?
• What is the genre of this writing (i.e., a lab report, a case study, a research paper, a reflection, a scholarship essay, an analysis of a work of literature or a painting, a summary and analysis of a reading, a literature review, etc.), and what does writing in this genre usually look like, consist of, or do?

Why is this technique useful? Reading over the assignment prompt may sound like an obvious starting point, but it is very important that your invention strategies are informed by the expectations your readers have about your writing. For example, you might brainstorm a fascinating thesis about how Jules Verne served as a conceptual progenitor of the nuclear age, but if your assignment is asking you to describe the differences between fission and fusion and provide examples, this great idea won’t be very helpful. Before you let your ideas run free, make sure you fully understand the boundaries and possibilities provided by the assignment prompt.

Additionally, some assignments begin to do the work of invention for you. Instructors sometimes identify specifically what they want you to write about. Sometimes they invite you to choose from several guiding questions or a position to support or refute. Sometimes the genre of the text can help you identify how this kind of assignment should begin or the order your ideas should follow. Knowing this can help you develop your content. Before you start conjuring ideas from scratch, make sure you glean everything you can from the prompt.

Finally, just sitting with the assignment and thinking through its guidelines can sometimes provide inspiration for how to respond to its questions or approach its challenges.

Reading Again

What do I do? When your writing task is centered around analyzing a primary source, information you collected, or another kind of text, start by rereading it. Perhaps you are supposed to develop an argument about an interview you conducted, an article or short story you read, an archived letter you located, or even a painting you viewed or a particular set of data. In order to develop ideas about how to approach this object of analysis, read and analyze this text again. Read it closely. Be prepared to take notes about its interesting features or the questions this second encounter raises. You can find more information about rereading literature to write about it here and specific tips about reading poetry here .

Why is this technique useful? When you first read a text, you gain a general overview. You find out what is happening, why it’s happening, and what the argument is. But when you reread that same text, your attention is freed to attend to the details. Since you know where the text is heading, you can be alert to patterns and anomalies. You can see the broader significance of smaller elements. You can use your developing familiarity with this text to your advantage as you become something of a minor expert whose understanding of this object deepens with each re-read. This expertise and insight can help lead you towards original ideas about this text.

Brainstorming/Listing

What do I do? First, consider your prompt, assignment, or writing concern (see “Analyzing the Assignment or Task”). Then start jotting down or listing all possible ideas for what you might write in response. The goal is to get as many options listed as possible. You may wish to develop sub-lists or put some of your ideas into different categories, but don’t censor or edit yourself. And don’t worry about writing in full sentences. Write down absolutely everything that comes to mind—even preposterous solutions or unrealistic notions. If you’re working on a collaborative project, this might be a process that you conduct with others, something that involves everyone meeting at the same time to call out ideas and write them down so everyone can see them. You might give yourself a set amount of time to develop your lists, or you might stretch out the process across a couple of days so that you can add new ideas to your lists whenever they occur to you.

Why is this technique useful? The idea behind this strategy is to open yourself up to all possibilities because sometimes even the most seemingly off-the-wall idea has, at its core, some productive potential. And sometimes getting to that potential first involves recognizing the outlandish. There is time later in your writing process to think critically about the viability of your options as well as which possibilities effectively respond to the prompt and connect to your audience. But brainstorming or listing sets those considerations aside for a moment and invites you to open your imagination up to all options.

Freewriting

What do I do? Sit down and write about your topic without stopping for a set amount of time (i.e., 5-10 minutes). The goal is to generate a continuous, forward-moving flow of text, to track down all of your thoughts about this topic, as if you are thinking on the page. Even if all you can think is, “I don’t know what to write,” or, “Is this important?” write that down and keep on writing. Repeat the same word or phrase over again if you need to. If you’re writing about an unfamiliar topic, maybe start by writing down everything you know about it and then begin listing questions you have. Write in full sentences or in phrases, whatever helps keep your thoughts flowing. Through this process, don’t worry about errors of any kind or gaps in logic. Don’t stop to reread or revise what you wrote. Let your words follow your thought process wherever it takes you.

Why is this technique useful? The purpose of this technique is to open yourself up to the possibilities of your ideas while establishing a record of what those ideas are. Through the unhindered nature of this open process, you are freed to stumble into interesting options you might not have previously considered.

Invisible Writing

What do I do? In this variation of freewriting, you dim your computer screen so that you can’t see what you’ve written as you type out your thoughts.

Why is this technique useful? This is a particularly useful technique if while you are freewriting you just can’t keep yourself from reviewing, adjusting, or correcting your writing. This technique removes that temptation to revise by eliminating the visual element. By temporarily limiting your ability to see what you’ve written, this forward-focused method can help you keep pursuing thoughts wherever they might go.

Looped Freewriting

What do I do? This is another variation of freewriting. After an initial round of freewriting or invisible writing, go back through what you’ve written and locate one idea, phrase, or sentence that you think is really compelling. Make that the starting point for another round of timed freewriting and see where an uninterrupted stretch of writing starting from that point takes you. After this second round of freewriting, identify a particular part of this new text that stands out to you and make that the opening line for your third round of freewriting. Keep repeating this process as many times as you find productive.

Why is this technique useful? Sometimes this technique is called “mining” because through it writers are able to drill into the productive bedrock of ideas as well as unearth and discover latent possibilities. By identifying and expanding on concepts that you find particularly intriguing, this technique lets you focus your attention on what feels most generative within your freewritten text, allowing you to first narrow in and then elaborate upon those ideas.

Talking with Someone

What do I do? Find a generous and welcoming listener and talk through what you need to write and how you might go about writing it. Start by reading your assignment prompt aloud or just informally explaining what you are thinking about saying or arguing in your paper. Then be open to your listener’s reactions, curiosities, suggestions, and questions. Invite your listener to repeat in his or her own words what you’ve been saying so that you can hear how someone else is understanding your ideas. While a friend or classmate might be able to serve in this role, writing center tutors are also excellent interlocutors. If you are a currently enrolled UW-Madison student, you are welcome to make an appointment at our main writing center, stop by one of our satellite locations , or even set up a Virtual Meeting to talk with a tutor about your assignment, ideas, and possible options for further exploration.

Why is this technique useful? Sometimes it’s just useful to hear yourself talk through your ideas. Other times you can gain new insight by listening to someone else’s understanding of or interest in your assignment or topic. A genuinely curious listener can motivate you to think more deeply and to write more effectively.

Reading More

Sometimes course instructors specifically ask that you do your analysis on your own without consulting outside sources. When that is the case, skip this technique and consider implementing one of the others instead.

What do I do? Who else has written about your topic, run the kind of experiments you’ve developed, or made an argument like the one you’re interested in? What did they say about this issue? Do some internet searches for well-cited articles on this concept. Locate a book in the library stacks about this topic and then look at the books that are shelved nearby. Read where your interests lead you. Take notes about things other authors say that you find intriguing, that you have questions about, or that you disagree with. You might be able to use any of these responses to guide your developing paper. (Make sure you also record bibliographic information for any texts you want to incorporate in your paper so that you can correctly cite those authors.)

Why is this technique useful? Exploring what others have written about your topic can be a great way to help you understand this issue more fully. Through reading you can locate support for your ideas and discover arguments you want to refute. Reading about your topic can also be a way of figuring out what motivates you about this issue. Which texts do you want to read more of? Why? Capitalize on and expand upon these interests.

Visualizing Ideas

Mindmapping, clustering, or webbing.

What do I do? This technique is a form of brainstorming or listing that lets you visualize how your ideas function and relate. To make this work, you might want to locate a large space you can write on (like a whiteboard) or download software that lets you easily manipulate and group text, images, and shapes (like Coggle , FreeMind , or MindMapple ). Write down a central idea then identify associated concepts, features, or questions around that idea. If some of those thoughts need expanding, continue this map, cluster, or web in whatever direction is productive. Make lines attaching various ideas. Add and rearrange individual elements or whole subsets as necessary. Use different shapes, sizes, or colors to indicate commonalities, sequences, or relative importance.

Why is this technique useful? This technique allows you to generate ideas while thinking visually about how they function together. As you follow lines of thought, you can see which ideas can be connected, where certain pathways lead, and what the scope of your project might look like. Additionally, by drawing out a map of you may be able to see what elements of your possible paper are underdeveloped and may benefit from more focused brainstorming.

The following sample mindmap illustrates how this invention technique might be used to generate ideas for an environmental science paper about Lake Mendota, the Wisconsin lake just north of UW-Madison. The different branches and connections show how your mind might travel from one idea to the next. It’s important to note, that not all of these ideas would appear in the final draft of this eventual paper. No one is likely to write a paper about all the different nodes and possibilities represented in a mindmap. The best papers focus on a tightly defined question. But this does provide many potential places to begin and refine a paper on this topic. This mindmap was created using shapes and formatting options available through PowerPoint.

Notecarding

What do I do? This technique can be especially useful after you’ve identified a range of possibilities but aren’t sure how they might work together. On individual index cards, post-its, or scraps of paper, write out the ideas, questions, examples, and/or sources you’re interested in utilizing. Find somewhere that you can spread these out and begin organizing them in whatever way might make sense. Maybe group some of them together by subtopic or put them in a sequential order. Set some across from each other as conflicting opposites. Make the easiest organization decisions first so that the more difficult cards can be placed within an established framework. Take a picture or otherwise capture the resulting schemata. Of course, you can also do this same kind of work on a computer through software like Prezi or even on a PowerPoint slide.

Why is this technique useful? This technique furthers the mindmapping/clustering/webbing practice of grouping and visualizing your thoughts. Once ideas have been generated, notecarding invites you to think and rethink about how these ideas relate. This invention strategy allows you to see the big picture of your writing. It also invites you to consider how the details of sections and subsections might connect to each other and the surrounding ideas while giving you a sense of possible sequencing options.

The following example shows what notecarding might look like for a paper being written on the Clean Lakes Alliance—a not-for-profit organization that promotes the improvement of water quality in the bodies of water around Madison, Wisconsin. Key topics, subtopics, and possible articles were brainstormed and written on pieces of paper. These elements were then arranged to identify possible relationships and general organizational structures.

What do I do? Take the ideas, possibilities, sources, and/or examples you’ve generated and write them out in the order of what you might address first, second, third, etc. Use subpoints to subordinate certain ideas under main points. Maybe you want to identify details about what examples or supporting evidence you might use. Maybe you just want to keep your outline elements general. Do whatever is most useful to help you think through the sequence of your ideas. Remember that outlines can and should be revised as you continue to develop and refine your paper’s argument.

Why is this technique useful? This practice functions as a more linear form of notecarding. Additionally, outlines emphasize the sequence and hierarchy of ideas—your main points and subpoints. If you have settled on several key ideas, outlining can help you consider how to best guide your readers through these ideas and their supporting evidence. What do your readers need to understand first? Where might certain examples fit most naturally? These are the kinds of questions that an outline can clarify.

Asking Questions

Topoi questions.

In the introduction, we referenced the list that Aristotle developed of the more than two dozen ideas a person making an argument might use to locate the persuasive possibilities of that argument. Aristotle called these locations for argumentative potential “topoi.” Hundreds of years later, Cicero provided additional advice about the kinds of questions that provide useful fodder for developing arguments. The following list of questions is based on the topoi categories that Aristotle and Cicero recommended.

What do I do? Ask yourself any of these questions regarding your topic and write out your answers as a way of identifying and considering possible venues for exploration. Questions of definition: What is ____? How do we understand what ____ is? What is ____ comprised of?

Questions of comparison: What are other things that ____ is like? What are things that are nothing like ____?

Questions of relationship: What causes ____? What effects does ____ have? What are the consequences of ____?

Questions of circumstances: What has happened with ____ in the past? What has not happened with ____ in the past? What might possibly happen with ____ in the future? What is unlikely to happen with ____ in the future?

Questions of testimony: Who are the experts on ____ and what do they say about it? Who are people who have personal experience with ____ and what do they think about it?

If any of these questions initiates some interesting ideas, ask follow-up questions like, “Why is this the case? How do I know this? How might someone else answer this question differently?”

Why is this technique useful? The questions listed above draw from what both Aristotle and Cicero said about ways to go about inventing ideas. Questions such as these are tried-and-true methods that have guided speakers and writers towards possible arguments for thousands of years.

Journalistic Questions

What do I do? Identify your topic, then write out your answers in response to these questions:      Who are the main stakeholders or figures connected to ____?      What is ____?      Where can we find ____?  Where does this happen?      When or under what circumstances does ____ occur?      Why is ____ an issue?  Why does it occur? Why is it important?      How does ____ happen?

Why is this technique useful? This line of questioning is designed to make sure that you understand all the basic information about your topic. Traditionally, these are the kinds of questions that journalists ask about an issue that they are preparing to report about. These questions also directly relate to the Dramatistic Pentad developed by literary and rhetorical scholar Kenneth Burke. According to Burke, we can analyze anyone’s motives by considering these five parts of a situation: Act ( what ), Scene ( when and where ), Agent ( who ), Agency ( how ), and Purpose ( why ). By using these questions to identify the key elements of a topic, you may recognize what you find to be most compelling about it, what attracts your interest, and what you want to know more about.

Particle, Wave, Field Questions

One way to start generating ideas is to ask questions about what you’re studying from a variety of perspectives. This particular strategy uses particles, waves, and fields as metaphorical categories through which to develop various questions by thinking of your topic as a static entity (particle), a dynamic process (wave), and an interrelated system (field).

What do I do?

Ask yourself these questions about your issue or topic and write down your responses:

• In what ways can this issue be considered a particle, that is, a discrete thing or a static entity?
• How is this issue a wave, that is, a moving process?
• How is this issue a field, that is, a system of relationships related to other systems?

Why is this technique useful?

This way of looking at an issue was promoted by Young, Becker, and Pike in their classic text Rhetoric: Discovery and Change . The idea behind this heuristic is that anything can be considered a particle, a wave, and a field, and that by thinking of an issue in connection to each of these categories you’ll able to develop the kind of in-depth questions that experts ask about a topic. By identifying the way your topic is a thing in and of itself, an activity, and an interrelated network, you’ll be able to see what aspects of it are the most intriguing, uncertain, or conceptually rich.

The following example takes the previously considered topic—environmental concerns and Lake Mendota—and shows how this could be conceptualized as a particle, a wave, and a field as a way of generating possible writing ideas.

Particle: Consider Lake Mendota and its environmental concerns as they appear in a given moment. What are those concerns right now? What do they look like? Maybe it’s late spring and an unseasonably warm snap has caused a bunch of dead fish to wash up next to the Tenney Lock. Maybe it’s a summer weekend and no one can go swimming off the Terrace because phosphorous-boosted blue-green algae is too prevalent. Pick one, discrete environmental concern and describe it. Wave: Consider environmental concerns related to Lake Mendota as processes that have changed and will change over time. When were the invasive spiny water fleas first discovered in Lake Mendota? Where did they come from? What has been done to respond to the damage they have caused? What else could be proposed to resolve this problem. How is this (or any other environmental concern) a dynamic process? Field: Consider Lake Mendota’s environmental concerns as they relate to a range of disciplines, populations, and priorities. What recent limnology findings would be of interest to ice fishing anglers? How could the work being done on agricultural sustainability connect to the discoveries being made by chemists about the various compounds present in the water? What light could members of the Ho-Chunk nation shed on Lake Mendota’s significance? Think about how environmental and conservation concerns associated with this lake are interconnected across different community members and academic disciplines.

Moving Around

Get away from your desk and your computer screen and do whatever form of movement feels comfortable and natural for you. Get some fresh air, take a walk, go jogging, get on your bike, go for a swim, or do some yoga. There is no correct degree or intensity of movement in this process; just do what you can and what you’re most likely to enjoy. While you’re moving, you may want to zone out and give yourself a strategic break from your writing task. Or you might choose to mull your tentative ideas for your paper over in your mind. But whether you’re hoping to think of something other than your paper or you need to generate a specific idea or resolve a particular writing problem, be prepared to record quickly any ideas that come up. If bringing along paper or a small notebook and a pen is inconvenient, just texting yourself your new idea will do the trick. The objective with this technique is both to distance yourself from your writing concerns and to encourage your mind to build new connections through engaging in physical activity.

Numerous medical studies have found that aerobic exercise increases your body’s concentration of the proteins that help nerves grow in the parts of your brain where learning and higher thinking happens (Huang et al.). Similarly, from their review of the literature about how yoga benefits the brain, Desei et al. conclude that yoga boosts overall brain activity. Which is to say that moving physiologically helps you think.

Dr. Bonnie Smith Whitehouse, an associate professor of English at Belmont University and an alum of UW-Madison’s graduate program in Composition and Rhetoric Program and a former assistant director of Writing Across the Curriculum at UW-Madison, investigates the writerly benefits of walking. She provides a full treatment of how this particular form of movement can productively support writing in her book Afoot and Lighthearted: A Mindful Walking Log . In the following passage, she argues for a connection between creative processes and walking, but much of what she suggests is equally applicable to the beneficial value of other forms of movement.

A walk stimulates creativity after a ramble has concluded, when you find yourself back at your desk, before your easel, or in your studio. In 2014, Stanford University researchers Marily Opprezzo and Daniel L. Schwarz confirmed that walking increases creative ideation in real time (while the walker walkers) and shortly after (when the walker stops and sits down to create). Specifically, they found that walking led to an increase in “analogical creativity” or using analogies to develop creative relationships between things that may not immediately look connected. So when ancient Greek physician Hippocrates famously declared that walking is “the best medicine,” he seems to have had it right. When we walk, blood and oxygen circulate throughout the body’s organs and stimulate the brain. Walking’s magic is in fact threefold: it increases physical activity, boosts creativity, and brings you into the present moment.

Similarly, in her post about writing and jogging for the UW-Madison Writing Center’s blog, Literary Studies PhD student Jessie Gurd has explained:

What running allows me to do is clear my head and empty it of a grad student’s daily anxieties. Listening to music or cicadas or traffic, I can consider one thing at a time and turn it over in my mind. It’s a groove I hit after a couple of miles; I engage with the problem, question, or task I choose and roll with it until my run is over. In this physical-mental space, I sometimes feel like my own writing instructor as I tackle some stage of the writing process: brainstorming, outlining, drafting.

While Bonnie Smith Whitehouse walks as an important part of her writing process and Jessie Gurd runs to write, what intentional movement looks like for you can be adapted according to your interests, preferences, and abilities. Whether it’s strolling, jogging, doing yoga, or participating in some other form of movement, these physical activities allow you to take a purposeful break that can help you concentrate your mind and even generate new conceptual connections.

All aspects of writing require hard work. It takes work to develop organizational strategies, to sequence sentences, and to revise paragraphs. And it takes work to come up with the ideas that will fill these sentences and paragraphs in the first place. But if you feel burdened by the necessity to develop new concepts, the good news is that you’re not the first writer who’s had to begin responding to an assignment from scratch. You are backed by a vast history of other writers’ experiences, a history that has shaped a collective understanding of how to get started. So, use the experience of others to your advantage. Try a couple of these techniques and maybe even develop some other methods of your own and see what new ideas these old strategies can help you generate!

Works Cited

Aristotle. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse . Edited and translated by George Kennedy, Oxford University Press, 1991.

Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives . University of California Press, 1969.

Cicero, Marcus Tullius. On Oratory and Orators . Edited and translated by J.S. Watson, Southern Illinois University Press, 1986.

Desai, Radhika, et al. “Effects of Yoga on Brain Waves an Structural activation: A review.” Complementary Therapies in clinical Practice ,vol, 21, no, 2, 2015, pp. 112-118.

Gurd, Jessie. “Writing Offstage.” Another Word , The Writing Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 7 October 2013, https://writing.wisc.edu/blog/writing-offstage/ . Accessed 5 July 2018.

Harris, Joseph. Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts . Utah State University Press, 2006.

Huang, T. et al. “The Effects of Physical Activity and Exercise on Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor in Healthy Humans: A Review.” Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports , vol. 24, no. 1, 2013. Wiley Online Library , https://doi.org/10.1111/sms.12069 .

Oppezzo, Marily, and Daniel L. Schwartz. “Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition , vol. 40, no. 4, 2014, pp. 1142-52.

Smith Whitehouse, Bonnie, email message to author, 19 June 2018.

Young, Richard E., Alton L. Becker, and Kenneth L. Pike. Rhetoric: Discovery and Change . Harcourt College Publishing, 1970.

Writing Process and Structure

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Getting Started with Your Paper

Interpreting Writing Assignments from Your Courses

Creating an Argument

Thesis vs. Purpose Statements

Developing a Thesis Statement

Architecture of Arguments

Working with Sources

Quoting and Paraphrasing Sources

Using Literary Quotations

Citing Sources in Your Paper

Drafting Your Paper

Introductions

Paragraphing

Developing Strategic Transitions

Conclusions

Revising Your Paper

Peer Reviews

Reverse Outlines

Revising an Argumentative Paper

Revision Strategies for Longer Projects

Finishing Your Paper

Twelve Common Errors: An Editing Checklist

How to Proofread your Paper

Writing Collaboratively

Collaborative and Group Writing

16 Brainstorming Techniques to Boost Your Writing Skills

Have you ever wondered how writers become famous? Creativity is the key to their success, regardless of the genre in which they write. Many have prosperous careers because of the unconventional approaches they use in their work. Brainstorming, which often combines disparate ideas to reach innovative conclusions, is an important part of the creative process.

This article presents a collection of techniques and strategies to boost your creative thinking. Here you will find step-by-step instructions on how to engage in a brainstorming session. In addition, we’ve provided a list of the top free apps to ensure your success.

❓ What Is Brainstorming?

• 📝 Brainstorming Techniques for Writing
• 👣 Brainstorming Session: 6 Steps
• 📱 Free Apps

Brainstorming is a method used to find a creative solution to a complex problem. The first step in the brainstorming process is to identify the problem. The next is to generate as many ideas as possible, no matter how fantastic or strange, which could provide a solution. Finally, those ideas that offer the most creative way to solve the problem are selected and used.

In the 19th century, the term “brain-storm” was used to refer to a mental disturbance. A century later, in the 1940s, a similar word was coined for a different purpose. Alex Osborn, an advertising executive, developed a system to facilitate the production of ideas. He called it “brainstorming.” Some business executives believed that the term held medical connotations and was potentially offensive. They suggested using different terms, like “cloud bursting” and “thought shower,” but none of them caught on.

Brainstorming is an informal way to arrange a business meeting. It also can be used for personal purposes, especially by creative people. The main goal is to avoid criticizing or rewarding any of the ideas.

How Will Brainstorming Make Me a Better Writer?

Our society has trained our brains so much that thinking outside the box becomes more and more challenging the older we get.

If you are a writer, brainstorming is the best technique you can use in your work. It silences self-criticism and traditional thinking . Use a voice recorder or a pen and piece of paper to keep track of your ideas. Do not judge whether your thoughts are good or bad. Just record the flow of ideas.

There are six stages of writing. You start by generating ideas for your topic. Then, you plan your work, make an outline, and create content ideas. After this step, you usually face writer’s block. This is the most challenging time, but when you overcome it, you can write and finish your project. Brainstorming can help you at each of these stages. Below, you will find 15 techniques to help you along the entire writing process.

Writing is a creative activity, and brainstorming is the perfect tool to help you improve your skills. For this process to become even more productive, apart from following the tips below, we also recommend you to check out our essay database . It’s a perfect place to find information and sources of reference for any paper you’re about to write.

Individual Brainstorming

For many reasons, conventional thinking is viewed as the most productive type of thinking. But for creative jobs, this often proves to be quite wrong. The value of artists, writers, poets, and musicians lies in their uniqueness. It has been proven that individual brainstorming sessions produce more valuable results than group sessions. One explanation might be that when you work by yourself, you’re not afraid of how others will judge your ideas. On your own, you are free and more creative.

Group Brainstorming

The individual approach is more efficient with simple problems and broad ideas. But group brainstorming is perfect when a complex problem is at stake. Sophisticated issues require the input of many different perspectives. For example, during audit planning, a manager’s opinion is only a small part of the brainstorming session. Each employee should have a chance to propose possible solutions.

📝 16 Brainstorming Techniques for Every Stage of Writing

Some topics are so difficult that you could spend hours on end trying to think of something special to write. Complicated philosophical essays can also be challenging. Sometimes, a topic may offer an overwhelming number of ways to complete the assignment, but none seems appropriate. In all of these cases, a good brainstorming session is usually the first stop on your path to success.

We have selected the 16 best techniques to generate ideas at each stage of writing a paper of any length. Fifteen minutes of effort at every stage can save you hours of fruitless thinking.

Stage 1: Generating Topic Ideas

Before you begin writing, you need to identify your topic. This decision will narrow the field of your research. Here are five techniques to help you.

1. Brainwriting

This brainstorming game works well in groups. For instance, your teacher might assign a task to write an essay on internet addiction. Her preference is that no one in the class has the same topic.

• The first person writes down three topic ideas and passes the paper to the next student.
• The second person uses the topics already listed to trigger their own ideas and adds another three.
• This process repeats until all members of the class have added three topics to the list.
• Three to five minutes for each person is enough. You can make several rounds around the group if necessary.
• When you are done, cross out the topics that repeat or don’t apply.
• Share the remaining topics with the members of the brainstorming group.

2. Freewriting

This method offers the best way to avoid censoring ideas .

Have a lot of paper on hand (freewriting can take up a lot of space). Do not think about what to write next, and don’t judge your thoughts as good or bad. The only requirements are:

• Write in sentences and paragraphs.
• Keep on writing. If you don’t have any new ideas, write something like, “I am waiting for an idea, and it will come” as many times as you need before a new idea does come.

This exercise takes about 20 minutes, or you can continue until you feel the topic is ready.

3. Meditation

The general purpose of essay brainstorming is to free your mind from stress and improve its performance. What could combat stress better than meditation ? This technique is known for improving the quality of your sleep, focus, and even academic performance.

It also helps writers find the answers they need. While meditating, they remove distractive thoughts and focus on what matters.

4. The criminal technique

In the words of the wise Pablo Picasso, “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.”

This method is perfect for selecting a title for your writing. Search for about fifteen texts similar to the one you have to write. Analyze the advantages and disadvantages of their titles. Then, combine the good parts into your own original title. Voila!

5. The worst idea challenge

Try this when nothing else has been successful. Write down the worst topic ideas you can think of. You will be surprised, but some of them will not be as bad as you thought in the beginning. Our brain is primed for conventional wisdom and critical thinking, and these are the last things you need when trying to engage in creative activities.

Stage 2: Planning Your Work

Congratulations on coming up with a list of topics that perfectly match your assignment! But now, you have to choose just one. At this stage, you need to plan how and where you will search for information to include in your paper. SWOT analysis is a great tool to help you.

6. SWOT analysis

This technique is traditionally used to evaluate the strong and weak points of a company, but we can also use it to assess ideas for creative purposes. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. To evaluate the feasibility of your topic, juxtapose its strengths and opportunities with its weaknesses and threats. If the latter outweighs the former, choose another topic.

Stage 3: Outlining

This is often the most hated stage of writing, both among students and copywriters. Still, you’ll be thankful that your outline is so structured and detailed when you proceed to the writing phase. These two techniques can sweeten the pill.

7. Clustering/idea mapping

Draw a picture of all the ideas you have on the chosen subject. This technique is a great way to establish the relationships between problems, their causes, and consequences.

• Put your main idea or the possible thesis statement at the center of the paper.
• Write down related issues and draw connecting lines between them.
• Add problems, hypotheses, and facts that contribute to these issues.
• When you’re done, you will have a detailed diagram to help you develop any argument on your topic.

8. Topic association

Did you play the word association game as a child? This technique will help you generate and structure multiple ideas.

• Use short phrases or single words.
• Start with the topic word in the center.
• Write down sub-topics around it. Their relation should be general-to-specific, not cause-and-effect, like in idea mapping.
• Make another row of sub-sub-topics, and so on.

Stage 4: Generating Content Ideas

When your outline is ready, you need to produce those minor content details that make up a compelling paper. Although all of the above techniques can help create content ideas, here are several brainstorming techniques that offer specific benefits at this stage.

9. Reverse brainstorming

This is a useful tool for essays that need to offer a solution to a problem. In this case, the brainstorming procedure is used in reverse. Think of something that could cause or aggravate the given problem. The worse the consequences, the better! Repeat this step until you have brainstormed a complete disaster. Then, begin to examine how to eliminate those problems.

10. The Five Whys

This technique will bring you to the root of any issue. Think of a problem, ask yourself why it occurred, and write down the answer. Then, identify the cause of the last thing you wrote down. Continue the same sequence five times (or more, if needed).

For example:

• Why did the boat sink? Because the engine failed.
• Why did the engine fail? Because it overheated.
• Why did it overheat? Etc.

11. Role Storming

The method works best in a group, but you can brainstorm on your own for your writing purposes. Put yourself in the shoes of a person whose problem is discussed in your paper. If the topic is child obesity, think about the experiences the affected children and their parents might go through. If it is domestic violence, take on the roles of the victim, offender, and bystander. Empathy helps us see the same situation from different points of view.

12. Figure storming (an excellent idea for a historical project)

Choose a historical or fictional figure whose life, actions, and views are familiar to you. Imagine that you are Albert Einstein , Steve Jobs , or Thomas Edison , and that someone has asked you how to tackle a certain problem. What would you, as a great intellectual, suggest? We often lack clarity and assertiveness. Let these figures (and many more, thanks to our rich history) assist you.

13. Question everything

The name of the technique is self-explanatory, but the following example will make it more accessible. Question every single aspect of the topic you discuss, and you will discover new ideas.

Topic: The pros and cons of online education.

Questions: Are there any pros of online education? What is online education? Who cares about the problems of online education? Is the issue even worthy of consideration?

14. Pros and cons (excellent for argumentative and persuasive texts)

You have probably never noticed it, but you use this method every day. You weigh the value and price of any purchase before paying for it. You consider whether to stay in college or leave when you are offered an exciting job before graduation. Write down the available options (they can be more than two). Then, make a list of their strong and weak points. It will help you decide which argument to adhere to in an argumentative text.

Stage 5: Overcoming Writer’s Block

We all have a fear of a blank page. Even when you have an outline and a list of creative ideas, it can be difficult to begin writing. This is a common problem with perfectionists: they want everything to be perfect from the start. To overcome this block, use freestorming.

15. Freestorming

Freestorming is very similar to freewriting, which was discussed in the section on generating topic ideas. The difference is that with freestorming, you do not need to give yourself an arbitrary time limit. Take as much time as you need and write whatever comes to your mind on the subject. You are not just limited to topic generation now, so you can make the brainstorming experience more relaxed.

Stage 6: Writing

All the techniques above have probably generated so many ideas that you most likely have to choose which ones to include in your text. Another issue you may face now is selecting the right words. For that, the technique below will come in handy.

16. Word banks

To avoid repeating yourself, make a list of five to ten of the most common words in your text. To diversify your writing, find synonyms and use them throughout your paper.

👣 Organize a Great Brainstorming Session in 6 Steps

Brainstorming is the best method to search for a creative or strategic solution. It allows a group of people to accumulate a great number of ideas in a short time. But without proper organization, this opportunity for teamwork can be controlled by a few leaders, while the rest keep quiet. To make it a fair game that benefits each member, everyone should know and adhere to the rules.

Step 1: Demonstrate the Specific Problem

The person who organizes the session should make sure that all the participants have a clear understanding of the task. For example, it could be finding a solution to a problem, coming up with a new product or campaign, improving an existing solution, or defining new directions of research.

The following procedure will help you avoid any unwanted issues:

• State a clear, short question that embodies the entire problem.
• Establish boundaries for brainstorming ideas. These limitations will make the session more productive. For example: When does the research project need to be completed? What is the maximum amount of money that can be invested in the new product?
• Try to keep the limits to a minimum so that you can have a broader range of solutions.

Step 2: Establish the Context and Definitions

When a business project or research project involves a large group of people, knowledge distribution tends to be uneven, and the leaders usually know more than the rest. Everyone will benefit if this gap is decreased. These questions will help you equalize the knowledge between all the members:

• What do the participants know about the context?
• What else do they need to know to be productive thinkers?
• What are the key terms everyone should understand in the same way?

Step 3: Choose a Facilitator

It is important that each participant knows the main rule: there is no room for criticism or skepticism. The participants must give free rein to their imagination. They need to pick up each other’s ideas and develop them, supplementing them with their own insights. The facilitator is the one who keeps an eye on these “formalities:”

• They make sure everyone makes a contribution.
• They prevent anyone from dominating the session.
• They keep the participants focused.
• They do not generate ideas but combine them to keep the session moving.

Step 4: Collect the Right People

Be aware that the presence of some people can be detrimental to the session. Effective brainstorming needs people who are equally invested in the problem question. These rules can save your session from a disaster:

• Select three to eight people.
• Make sure some of them are experts. They will check every idea for viability.
• The other part of the group should be non-experts (i.e., workers or researchers from a neighboring domain). Experts are limited by their knowledge, and it is harder for them to think outside the box. Non-experts will ask silly questions entailing unconventional thinking.
• Try to select members from different backgrounds, age groups, and cultures. Diversity is your purpose!

Step 5: Plan the Session

It is helpful to prepare this point in a group handout. We suggest the following schedule:

• 20 minutes to set out the problem, its limitations, context, and definitions;
• 30 minutes for generating the options and new ideas;
• 20 minutes for sorting and discussing the brainstorming results; and
• 10 minutes to wrap up the session.

Step 6: Carry out the Session

There are multiple exercises, games, and techniques for successful brainstorming. Many of them were given above. But if you want to make it quick and simple, this procedure will do:

• The facilitator provides sticky notes to each member.
• They write down their ideas.
• These papers are put together in a place visible to everyone (a table or whiteboard).
• The facilitator groups them into several categories.
• Any new ideas are welcome on extra notes.
• The members vote for the best ideas and put them aside.
• Special attention should be given to the most innovative solutions.
• The facilitator summarizes the results and ends the session.

📱 Top 10 Free Brainstorming Apps

It is the XIX century, and brainstorming sessions can be held across continents. Moreover, free software can help you arrange new ideas and merge or compare them. If you are wondering how to innovate in groups or on your own, these apps can make you an expert brainstormer.

Brainstorming is a beautiful process in which a group of people with different experiences, views, and expertise unite to create something new. We hope that our advice and tips will enhance your creativity as a writer and a team player. If you have been a member or facilitator in a brainstorming group, share your know-how in the comments below.

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Where to Begin? 6 Personal Essay Brainstorming Exercises

←8 Do’s and Don’ts for Crafting Your College Essay

Creating the First Draft of Your College Application Essay →

The Common App publishes a list of 7 prompts each year. They ultimately ask for similar types of responses, regardless of slight alterations year-to-year. The Common App prompts provide you with a forum to write about yourself, using whatever anecdote or vehicle you wish in order to communicate something profound and genuine about yourself to adcoms.

If this feat seems daunting or spellbindingly vague to you, you are not alone. For virtually every student applying to college, the moment when you sit down to draft your personal statement is likely the first—and may end up being the only—time in your life when you are pushed to describe your entire identity succinctly and eloquently. So, where to begin?

As with any writing assignment, the best way to approach the personal essay is to brainstorm what it is you want the entire essay to communicate about you to the adcom that will be considering you for admission. Read on for 4 surprising brainstorming exercises that will lead you to an effective personal statement strategy.

1. Consider the four core questions.

When writing your personal statement, there are four questions that your essay should answer:

• “Who am I?”
• “Why am I here?”
• “What is unique about me?”
• “What matters to me?”

These questions are important because they help bring awareness to the kind of person you are and touch on things such as your personality traits, your journey throughout high school, the interests and skills that make you unique, and what’s important to you. Colleges want to understand how you became who you are, and where you’re going (successful alumni reflect well on their school, after all!).

2. Try freeform writing.

To help answer these questions and start brainstorming, freeform writing is a good place to start. Begin by writing down 3-5 aspects of your personality or experiences and spend some time constructing narratives out of these different combinations.

This process of getting some ideas on paper and seeing how they can relate to each other can help you better identify a prompt that works for you. For example, you might note that you enjoy tutoring students in STEM, and are now working with a local school to create a Women in STEM initiative in your school district. You may also have tried previous initiatives that failed. These experiences could be constructed and applied to a number of Common App prompts. You could address a specific identity or interest you have associated with STEM, discuss what you learned from your failed initiatives, explore how you challenged the lack of women in STEM programs in your school district, envision solving for the lack of women involved in the science and mathematics fields, etc.

3. Make a list of opinions you firmly hold and explain them.

This exercise requires you to think about aspects of your identity that you have actively chosen. While exercise #4 asks you to consider what parts of your identity you have struggled to overcome, this exercise asks you to consider what aspects of your identity you are most proud of—those opinions that you hold because you chose to believe in something specific of your own accord.

This is an important brainstorming exercise because it should get you thinking about things you are passionate about. Ultimately, you will want to write your personal statement about something that defines you, gets you excited, and can exhibit your ability to think and speak for yourself. So now, before you start writing, make a list of the things that you care about most, and explain why you feel that way about them.

This list can include everything from your political affiliation to your stance on McDonald’s decision in the past year to serve breakfast for longer. The point of this exercise is that there is no right or wrong way of going about it, no topic that is more worthwhile than any other so long as you are passionate about it.

4. Make a list of your character flaws.

While the ultimate goal of the personal essay is to present yourself in as positive a light as possible to adcoms, the challenge is to do so in a way that is realistic and genuine. To do this, you’ll need to do some serious thinking about what types of character flaws accompany your best traits.

There are two main reasons why we suggest that students not shy away from talking about their own shortcomings as well as their achievements. The first reason is quite simple: a personal statement that paints a picture of its writer as perfect and without flaws will come across as dishonest and unrealistic. Obviously, you want to avoid this at all costs. Second, and even more important, if you are able to write a personal statement that acknowledges your flaws and recognizes that you are imperfect, it will reflect positively on you and vouch for your maturity.

If it feels counterintuitive or scary to dwell on anything other than successes, do not fret: that is the expected reaction to this advice. But if done correctly, acknowledging that you are not perfect can add genuineness to any personal essay. So, how to discuss character flaws? There are several ways to go about this.

One way is to discuss a character flaw that you have always struggled with and worked to improve upon throughout your life. In this scenario, discussing flaws can help introduce a discussion about growth or maturation and give your personal statement a nice narrative arc. Yet another way to discuss your character flaws is to acknowledge how certain struggles or personal shortcomings have shaped your identity, allowing you to go into more detail about the ways in which you were able to better yourself by identifying a flaw in yourself and being willing to fix it.

The thinking here is that students have no difficulty remembering all of the accomplishments, productive experiences, and glowing achievements that they want to include in their personal statements. After all, it is easy to write about these things. It is much harder to force yourself to think about aspects of your identity that rankle, and to think about how these things have shaped you.

5. Reflect on your choices and why you made them.

Another brainstorming exercise that can help you think of a topic is to reflect on what choices you’ve made and why. Once you come up with a list, it will be easier to see what you value and the direction in which you can take your essay.

Think about some of these questions to get the juices flowing:

• Why are they my best friend?
• Under what circumstances did we become friends?
• When did we last fight?
• If I had to spend 10 days doing the same exercise or physical activity, what would I choose? Why?
• Say I had to pick one food, and my three closest friends or family members could only eat that food for one week. What would that food be and why?
• Say I had to start a business selling something, and I would achieve the average level of success (financially, socially, etc) within that business, what would I choose to do?
• What movie would I want to take the place of a character in and which character would I want to play? Why?
• What class or teacher did I like most, and why? What class or teacher did I dislike most, and why?
• If I had to choose between singing, doing standup comedy, or dancing in front of 18,000 people, what would I choose? Why?

6. Make a list of anecdotes, childhood memories, or stories about yourself. Then choose one and make it your “vehicle.”

Finally, you should conclude your brainstorming session by searching for a vehicle: an anecdote that you can use to frame your personal statement.

You can use anecdotes in your personal statement in a number of ways. Some students choose to open with one, others close with one, and still others will use two or three anecdotes in order to add color and rhetorical flair to the points they are trying to make about themselves. The best types of anecdotes are the ones that tell the most about you or give insight into your character.

When we help students write their personal statements, we usually begin by brainstorming a few potential anecdotes to use in your essay. But if you are wondering what the point is of using an anecdote— Why use one at all when I could save words and just talk about myself ?—it’s useful to first understand why telling a story or two makes your personal statement stronger.

Ultimately, you will want your personal statement to communicate something about your character and personality that is unique and appealing to schools. When an adcom reads your personal statement, they are looking to hear about you in general, they are looking to learn something unique or special about you (so they can differentiate you from other applicants), and they are also looking for evidence that you would be a valuable addition to their community. But the fact of the matter is that these are fairly broad and vague directives to write about if you don’t have something specific to focus on.

This is where the anecdotes come in to save the day! They help instigate a conversation about yourself, your personality, your identity, and your character while also giving you something concrete to talk about. This is why we call it a “vehicle”—it can exist in its own right, but it carries with it important information about you as well.

Now that you know what the purpose of this vehicle is, it should be a little easier to brainstorm the anecdote(s) that you choose to frame your personal statement with. If you are not yet sure what to write about in your personal statement, you can start brainstorming anecdotes from your childhood, from favorite family stories to fond memories, from hilarious vacation mishaps to particularly tender moments. Do your parents have favorite stories to tell about you? Write those into your list as well.

Once you have a collection of stories to work with, you may begin to see certain patterns forming. Perhaps all of your favorite stories take place in the same setting—a vacation home that meant a lot to you or in the classroom of your favorite teacher. Maybe, you will realize that all of your fondest memories involve a certain activity or hobby of yours. Or, alternatively, you may notice that one story from your childhood mirrors or foreshadows a like, dislike, or accomplishment that would come to fruition later in your life.

If you already know what you want to say about yourself, you can come at the same exercise from another angle: try to think of several anecdotes that could be potential vehicles for the message about yourself that you want to transmit. If you want to illustrate that you love to learn, try to think pointedly about where that love comes from or what you have done that proves this. In this case, remember that any given anecdote can reveal more than one thing about you.

It is hard to imagine all of the possible personal statements that could come out of this brainstorming session, but it is almost certain that this exercise will help you come up with several concrete points to make about yourself and provide you with a tangible way to say those things.

Final Thoughts

If after doing these six brainstorming exercises, you still don’t feel ready to write your personal statement, fear not! Writing a personal essay is daunting and won’t be done in three steps, or even three days! 

For more guidance, check out these blog posts:

How to Write a Personal Statement That Wows Colleges

How to Come Up With an Idea for a Personal Statement

How to Write the Common App Essays

Mastering the Personal Statement

5 Tips for Editing Your College Essays

Want help with your college essays to improve your admissions chances? Sign up for your free CollegeVine account and get access to our essay guides and courses. You can also get your essay peer-reviewed and improve your own writing skills by reviewing other students’ essays.

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College Essay Brainstorming: Where to Start

Bonus Material: College Essay Brainstorming Questions  

The college essay is an extremely important component of your college application. Yes, college admissions officers do care about standardized test scores, academic transcripts, extracurricular activities, and letters of recommendation.

All of these application components can help officers assess a student’s academic and professional potential (and much more).

The college application essay, however, gives students a chance to share their unique voice with an admissions officer. It’s like a brief interview, where students can give officers a powerful glimpse of who they are outside of their application in roughly 650 words.

So what do you say in those 650 words? How do you pick the right essay topic?

It’s all about the brainstorming process. In general, the more time you can devote to gathering potential essay topics  before  you start writing, the better. Gathering this material can also be helpful for writing supplemental essays down the road.

In this post, we provide actionable tips for guiding your college essay brainstorming process. After reading this article, students will be well poised to gather topics and eventually select the “right” essay topic .

We also give students access to 30 free college essay brainstorming questions to get started. Grab these below.

Download College Essay Brainstorming Questions

Here’s what we cover:

The Importance of College Essay Brainstorming

• 8 College Essay Brainstorming Tips
• Bonus : 30 College Essay Brainstorming Questions

We define the college essay as a “demonstration of character, values, and/or voice.” It is an introspective, personal essay that (ideally) adds significant value to a student’s overall application.

Many students are not well-versed in writing this kind of essay. Indeed, most students are familiar with the concept of the academic essay, with its neat five paragraphs. Very few have had a lot of time in high school classrooms to write deeply reflective pieces, and concise ones at that. (Remember: you only have 650 words or fewer to craft your response!)

That’s why brainstorming is so essential  to the college essay writing process. It’s your key to pinpointing the right topic, which we define as one with the potential to generate an essay that aligns with these 7 winning qualities .

It can also be valuable for gathering potential topics for supplemental essay responses, which many competitive colleges require.

For these very reasons, we spend a significant amount of time brainstorming in our college essay mentoring programs and summer workshops. Students who are able to gather a lot of material in this time tend to have an easier job down the road choosing the right topic, creating an outline, and eventually writing that first draft.

What’s more, they might surprise themselves in what they are able to pull from their many life experiences! It’s not uncommon for an essay student to choose a certain topic they never would have considered prior to brainstorming.

The tips outlined in the next section reflect this great value of brainstorming, and are the same we offer our college essay students at the start of their process.

8 College Essay Brainstorming Tips

Don’t let that blank page intimidate you! Follow these tips to guide your brainstorming process and remember that this stage should and will take time.

1. Know the standards

Students should feel very comfortable with colleges’ general expectations for the essay  before  they start brainstorming. If you haven’t done so already, please check out the following PrepMaven posts:

• What is the College Essay?

7 Qualities of a Successful College Essay

• 11 College Essays That Worked
• What College Admissions Officers Look For

It can also be helpful to review the Common Application’s essay prompts . While students don’t necessarily have to respond to a  specific  prompt, these provide insight into the type of essay colleges are seeking.

2. No topic is “too small” (but some are “too big”)

Students only have 650 words (or fewer) to write their essays. That’s not a lot of space! For this reason, don’t shy away from seemingly “small” topics as you brainstorm.

One student who earned Ivy League acceptance, for example, wrote about her passion for hot sauce in her college essay!

On the same note, if you come up with “big” topics, such as cultural identity, a long-term extracurricular activity, or a religious belief, do your best to highlight specific components of these topics, or one representative experience. The best college essays don’t say everything there is to say about such large topics. Rather, they focus skillfully on one smaller component of a potentially bigger picture.

3. Write down all the details for every topic

When you land upon a topic, mine it for details. Write down everything you can think of about that experience, idea, or memory. Many of our students like to use bulleted lists in a Google Doc for doing this.

It’s important to squeeze out every possible detail so that you can fully assess a topic’s potential! In many cases, such details will become college essay topics themselves.

4. Work by category

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all of the possible topics out there–and don’t worry, this is common–gather ideas by category. Here are some sample category examples:

• Travel experiences
• Extracurricular activities
• Family life
• Culture and heritage
• Interests and hobbies
• Challenges (non-academic)

Categories can help you build a general portrait of who you are, at least to start. Once you have a few ideas per category, start diving deeper into those ideas and generating further details about each one.

5. Ask the right questions

It is often easier for students to generate a rich pool of potential topics by answering questions designed to encourage deep reflection and introspection. Of course, this begs the question: what should I be asking myself?

Take a look at these 30 questions  we ask our students in our college essay workshops and mentorship programs at the beginning of their process.

Once you’ve answered these questions fully and to the best of your ability, you’ll be poised for essay topic selection.

6. Keep it to yourself, mostly

Many college essay students risk writing about what their parents, friends, or teachers want them to write about. Others risk writing “what colleges want to hear.” Yet authenticity is one of the most important qualities of a successful college essay!

That’s why we encourage students to brainstorm independently. You are the only one in the world most familiar with your life experiences, after all! Consult family members, friends, or mentors only once you are further along in the essay writing process, or if you need clarification on the details of a specific experience. This will ensure you gather topics that are true to you first and foremost.

7. Maintain orderly notes

Brainstorming can be messy. Establish a system early on for maintaining orderly notes! Some tools that can come in handy:

• Bulleted or numbered lists
• Index cards
• Color-coding (digital or manual)
• Google Docs

8. Consider takeaways for each topic

As you compile topics, save time and start thinking in terms of “takeaways” for each. This will allow you to assess a topic’s potential for demonstrating your character, values, and/or voice.

Ask yourself for each topic : What values does this showcase? What does this say about me specifically? What meaningful reflections does it invite? What aspect of my voice is apparent here?

Download 30 College Essay Brainstorming Questions

You can jumpstart your college essay brainstorming process right now by downloading our college essay brainstorming questions.

With this free download, you’ll get:

• 30 of the best brainstorming questions we ask our students
• Guidance for next steps

Kate is a graduate of Princeton University. Over the last decade, Kate has successfully mentored hundreds of students in all aspects of the college admissions process, including the SAT, ACT, and college application essay. 

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20 Brainstorming Ideas For College Essays

Why? Because I’m working on essays with several seniors right now and, for the most part, it’s a painful process for them. Between homework and assignments for school, activities, and sports, it’s hard to find time to write your essay .

And while it’s hard to sit down and turn that blank piece of paper into something poetic, it’s ten times harder if you don’t even know what you want to write about. Sure, you have the Common App essay prompts to work off of, but which one is going to help you write the essay which will propel your application from good to great?

If this is you and you’re having a tough time just getting some ideas on paper, here are a few prompts to get your creative juices flowing:

• What is your favorite subject and why?
• How do you spend your time outside of school?
• What are your most unique talents?
• What is important to you?
• How has a moment in your life inspired you to be a different person?
• What is a life lesson that you’ve learned (especially if you learned it the hard way)?
• What are your greatest strengths?
• What are your weaknesses?
• What is the most unusual thing you’ve ever done?
• What is the most interesting place you’ve ever visited or travelled to?
• What is an accomplishment or achievement you are most proud of?
• What is an obstacle or challenge you have had to overcome?
• Who is someone in your life you are inspired by and why?
• What jobs have you held and what have you liked and disliked about them?
• How are you different from your friends or classmates?
• What is your relationship like with your family (think immediate and non-immediate family)?
• How would your best friend describe you?
• How would your parents describe you?
• How would your brother or sister (if you have either) describe you?
• If you had a “do-over” in your life, what is something you would do differently and why?

Some of these prompts require you to dig a little deeper than others, but at the end of the day they are all designed to do one thing: get you thinking about yourself. Because that’s what your essay is for; an opportunity to tell admissions counselors about awesome and wonderful you.

If you have questions about writing your college essay or would like some help getting unstuck from writer’s block, use the comment box below or email me directly at [email protected] . I would love to hear from you!

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Brainstorming Topics: 24 Great Topics to Get Creativity Flowing

These brainstorming topics are a great place to start if you are looking for a new creative idea for your writing work.

A brainstorming session can be a great way to get new ideas for a blog post, article book, podcast, short story or even a novel. If you’re hoping to get the creative juices flowing or struggle with writer’s block and want to start thinking creatively again, start with brainstorming is the place to start. There are many brainstorming techniques you can use to get the ideas flowing. Some of the more popular ones include:

• Listing or Bulleting
• Clustering or Mind Mapping
• Guided Brainstorming
• Group Brainstorming
• Brainwriting
• Rapid Ideation
• Storyboarding

Sometimes before you can begin brainstorming, you need the right central idea. Use it as a jumping-off point. Our article packed full of brainstorming tips explains more. Here are some brainstorming topics that can start the process. These topics are intentionally vague and open-ended because your mind can take you down many different paths as you explore them.

General Brainstorming Ideas for Those New to Brainstorming

1. childhood memories, 2. global warming, 3. impact of education, 4. a social controversy, 5. the impact of pets on your life, 6. write about a particular culture, brainstorming topics for students, 7. your favorite historical character, 9. great literature, 10. enterpreneurship and innovation, brainstorming strategies for marketing professionals, 11. a bad idea, 12. one big idea, brainstorming topics for creatives, 13. a mood board, 14. an inspiring image, brainstorming topics for writing, 15. memoir and personal experience, 16. fantasy and world-building , 17. sci-fi , 18. historical fiction, 20 romance and relationships, 21. mystery and suspense, 22. adventure and exploration, 23. dystopian and satire, 24. philosophical and thought-provoking.

If you are new to brainstorming, here are some ideas to get you started on the activity:

Childhood is something that has many different subtopics a writer could explore. You could talk about the emotions of childhood, or you could write about the responsibilities of childhood. This is an effective brainstorming starting point because everyone has a childhood. Whether it was a good one or a bad one, this is a universal topic that all writers can write on.

Because this is such a broad topic, you have many different paths you can go down for your brainstorming. Some ideas include vacations you took as a child, favorite toys you had, people who influenced or were important to you as a child.

Global warming is another broad topic that works well as a brainstorming idea. You can explore your opinion, discuss the human impact on global warming, and discuss its economic, geographic, and political impacts. As you brainstorm this topic, consider potential solutions you find. Add a section to your concept map that discuss solutions. After completing this activity, you will find multiple options to write about with this one broader topic.

Education is another broad topic that can work well for brainwriting activities. You can write about its impact on your life personally or its impacts on society. You can have a subtopic that explores some of the benefits of the right education or the drawbacks of a flawed educational system.

Education also gives you the chance to brainstorm techniques. What works in education, and what doesn’t? What is the role of the teacher and the student in education? The answers to these questions provide much information you can transform into articles and papers.

Another effective brainstorming technique is to take a current social controversy and make it your central idea. Then, spend time exploring the who, what, where, when, and how surrounding this topic. You can share ideas to solve the issue or explore potential causes, depending on your goal for the activity.

This topic can be effective if you brainstorm ideas for a blog post. You can engage with your audience well when you talk about something important to them, and social controversies tend to fit the bill well. You can also get a lot of engagement when using a hot-button topic like this.

Pets are something many people feel strongly about. If you have a pet, you know how close you can get to them. Consider using “pets” as the main topic in your freewriting activity, and then branch off with the different subtopics.

You can explore many things with this topic. For instance, you can look at the emotions you feel about your pet or have a subtopic that explores pet care concerns. You can talk about ethics and costs, as well.

Is there a culture you would like to learn about or know quite a bit about and would like to study further? This can be a great brainstorming topic. Start with the culture as your central idea, and then brainstorm facts about it.

What influences have you seen on the culture? What are some facts about it that are worth exploring? How has the culture changed? These are the ideas that can create the subtopics for your brainstorming session.

These ideas might get you started by brainstorming a topic for a research paper or essay.

Is there someone from history that you enjoy studying? This could be your brainstorming topic. Put that character as your central topic, and then brainstorm and map about them.

You’ll find quite a few paths to follow with this idea. Start with biographical information as one branch of your mind map, then move to impact and political or societal views for additional branches. As you dig into the research, add even more to the map until you have a full picture of who they are and how they impacted society.

Do you have a passion for weather or physics, or chemistry? Pick a science-related topic, and build that into your brainstorming session. You can delve deep into various aspects of the topic as you brainstorm.

This brainstorming topic works well if you need to write an academic paper. It also works if you are just interested in the topic in general.

A final idea for brainstorming topics is to look more closely at a particular piece of literature. Place the work’s title at the center of your concept map, then build branches to talk about characters, setting, and plot. You can also explore alternate endings to get some creative writing in.

If you write your work, you can use this idea to get your creativity flowing. Place the title or main plot point in the center of your graph, and start brainstorming. For some inspiration, read our guide to classic literature books .

The vibrant world of entrepreneurship and innovation has its unique allure. Students might entertain the creation of community-centric business models. Additionally, they could weigh in on how budding entrepreneurs are poised to redefine tomorrow.

History, with its tapestry of events and figures, offers a treasure trove of topics. Imagine if key historical events had taken a different turn? Or how about delving into the lives and legacies of influential leaders?

Brainstorming in the professional environment happens all the time. Some of the best ideas come from group brainstorming sessions. If you need help getting started, rather than taking on a topic, consider one of these activities:

If you’re looking for the next great idea with your group, consider listing the bad ideas first. This gives you room to state an idea that you think is bad, but it might actually be good, but it also lets you get all of your creativity out. Often, you will find some gems even within those ideas you think are bad. 

Remember, brainstorming aims to get all of the topics out. Some won’t be important to your writing or your project, but stating them is a good starting point. If you’re brainstorming in a group, letting them state their bad ideas first is a good way to break the ice and make people feel less inhibited about sharing their real ideas.

In marketing, you often start with a big idea or promotion, but you need to find a way to get that idea or promotion into the minds and eyes of your target audience. You can use a brainstorming session to do this.

Start with your big idea as the central point. Then, have you or your team break it down into smaller parts. Soon you will come up with different avenues you can tap as you work towards reaching your audience with your main marketing message. 

If you are creative in any industry, you know the frustration when your ideas run dry. Here are some brainstorming topics and ideas that can get your creativity flowing again.

The mood of the creator inspires much creativity. Create a board where you can brainstorm about a particular mood. For instance, you can add adjectives, images, and colors you associate with that mood. 

Make this brainstorming activity highly visual—the more visual, the better. With the images and ideas on your board, you will have a starting point for your creative work.

Whether it is something from nature or a classic artwork, find an inspiring image to start your brainstorming session. Put the image, rather than a word, at the center of your mind map or brainstorming flow chart. Then, build ideas from it.

You may find inspiration for a work of fiction in this way or an idea for your piece of art. Using the beauty around you can easily inspire your creative side if you spend a little time thinking about what you see. 

Deciding what you want to write about next and exploring your ideas is ripe for brainstorming. But sometimes, it helps to be more specific. Try these brainstorming topics for writing:

Diving into the depths of personal experiences, memoirs present a rich tapestry of emotions and events. Writers can explore pivotal moments that drastically changed the course of their lives. Alternatively, they could unravel an unexpected encounter with a stranger that left an indelible mark on their psyche. Venturing into the realm of dreams, one might pen down the most vivid and bewildering dream they’ve ever had, weaving it with real-life implications and interpretations. Read our guide to the best memoirists .

Consider a universe where shadows take on their own lives, having untold secrets and tales. Or, delve into the intricacies of a mystical tribe just discovered, detailing their rituals, customs, and magical practices. You could brainstorm about the intriguing concept of a common creature, perhaps something as humble as a rabbit or a butterfly, suddenly gaining unprecedented power and upending the established order. Read our guide to the best fantasy books .

Science fiction propels readers into the unknown, pushing the boundaries of current understanding. Envision Earth’s transformation after establishing contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. Brainstorm about what if time travel became possible? Dive into the moral dilemmas and societal changes such a breakthrough might entail. In a more abstract vein, imagine a dystopian future where raw emotions become commodities, traded and sold amongst individuals. 

History is always a good muse for writers. Imagine a clandestine romance blossoming amidst the vibrant backdrop of the Renaissance. Or, brainstorm the inner turmoil of a soldier caught in the crossfires of a devastating historical war. Through the eyes of a commoner, writers can also capture the essence of a major city during a significant historical event, blending factual events with fictional flourishes.

19. Horror and Thriller

Picture a quaint town with a chilling secret: every resident inexplicably goes mute for one day each year. Or, delve into the consequences that unfurl when someone stumbles upon an old tome with the sinister power to control minds. Adding a touch of mystery, brainstorm a detective’s harrowing journey as they become obsessed with a crime that evidence suggests might never have happened. Read our guide to the best horror authors .

Romance, with its myriad of emotions, offers vast narrative possibilities. Think of a heart-wrenching love story where two souls from parallel universes cross paths. Reflect on the challenges and bittersweet moments of a love story set in a world where humans only live for 30 years. Or, brainstorm a tale of two bibliophiles who, over time, fall in love through letters secretively left within the pages of a shared library book.

Mysteries have an innate allure, drawing readers into their web of intrigue. What could be the hidden story behind a series of anonymous gifts a woman receives every spring? Upon noticing the peculiar habits of a town’s residents, a journalist could embark on a quest for truth, revealing dark secrets. Alternatively, writers can craft a suspense-filled narrative about passengers on a stranded train, discovering unexpected ties that bind them together.

Adventures, with their thrill and unpredictability, make for captivating tales. Brainstorm the perilous journey of adventurers on a quest to discover a mythical city built entirely of gold. Dive into a child’s exhilarating escapade in a world that comes to life within a painting, complete with challenges and allies. Or, delve deep underwater, following explorers as they navigate an uncharted cave system’s dark, beautiful corridors.

The dystopian genre pushes writers to consider stark, often bleak, versions of the future. Brainstorm a tightly controlled society where memories are archived and any undesirable ones can be selectively erased. In stark contrast, picture a world reclaimed by nature, where humanity’s remnants grapple with survival. Or, peer into the daily lives of individuals residing under a massive dome after Earth’s atmosphere turns deadly. Read our guide to the best satire  authors

For those seeking deeper introspection, philosophical themes can be a goldmine. Contemplate on the very essence of human nature by exploring whether true altruism exists. Envision a society sculpted by the impossibility of deceit, where every spoken word is the absolute truth. Or, in a poignant narrative twist, imagine the intricacies of living in a world where everyone knows their exact date of death from the moment they’re born. Read our guide to the best philosophy books .

For more brainstorming ideas, check out our round-up of the best software for brainstorming .

Nicole Harms has been writing professionally since 2006. She specializes in education content and real estate writing but enjoys a wide gamut of topics. Her goal is to connect with the reader in an engaging, but informative way. Her work has been featured on USA Today, and she ghostwrites for many high-profile companies. As a former teacher, she is passionate about both research and grammar, giving her clients the quality they demand in today's online marketing world.

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Brainstorming Essay Topics for IELTS Writing Task 2

One of the most common mistakes students make when approaching their IELTS Task 2 Writing test is to just start writing. If you start to write before you think about what you are going to say, your essay may be incoherent and irrelevant—and your band score will suffer. The best way to fix this? Brainstorm IELTS Writing Task 2 topics before you write! In this post, we’ll take a look at how you can come up with essay topics for a variety of IELTS Task 2 Question Types to create the most coherent and relevant opinion essays possible.

Getting Started with IELTS Task 2 Essay Topics

Remember: on IELTS Academic Task 2 and the IELTS General Training Task 2, you’ll be writing a formal essay about an important issue facing the modern world or affective people’s lives. You won’t have outside resources with which to research the topic, so you’ll be relying on your own opinion. Because of this, factual accuracy is less important than the overall main ideas, cohesion, vocabulary (complexity, synonyms), and grammatical range (complex sentences) you show in your essay.

The biggest problem when students don’t brainstorm in IELTS essay writing is that it can make their essay choppy and off-topic. Together, coherence and relevance make up 50% of your score on the essay ! (Vocabulary/lexical resource and grammar are the other 50%.) Therefore, it is 100% essential that you spend 3 to 5 minutes planning your IELTS Task 2 writing —before you begin writing.

As the bulk of your points will be picked up in your two body paragraphs, I recommend that you start your essay by first brainstorming what ideas you will write about and what relevant examples you will include to back up your own knowledge. Let’s look at how to do this in IELTS writing Task 2 . First, here’s the overall process that you’ll use.

• Understand the type of question being asked.
• Brainstorm ideas.
• Choose an idea/ideas.
• Take short notes about your ideas.
• Start writing!

With that in mind, let’s look at each of these steps in greater detail.

Step-by-Step Guide to Brainstorming IELTS Writing Task 2

Step 1: understand the type of question being asked..

In another post, we examined the 5 main types of questions that you might see in the IELTS exam. Classifying IELTS questions into one of these categories according to common topics will help you make sure that you are answering the task response correctly. Look at the example Task 2 question below. How would you classify it?

Write at least 250 words.

This is a Problem + Solution question type, so keep that in mind as you start to brainstorm!

Step 2: Brainstorm ideas.

Let your mind wander for 30 to 60 seconds with all the possible ideas that instantly come to your mind. There is no need to make notes here, just mentally explore as many ideas as possible. These can be the negative effects or a negative impact of the problem, with a solution about how to avoid negative development of the situation—or they can be a positive suggestion, coming up with better ways to address the issue through a more positive development of the topic.

As you’ll see, these are the same types of ideas, just framed differently. The main point? Be sure you come up with examples in response to the direct questions the prompt is asking you.

Below, I have written out some of the thoughts and IELTS Writing Task 2 topics that initially came to my mind when I read the questions above.

Q2: Use unoccupied housing for other purposes; limit rent prices; government support for the poor; tax breaks for charging less rent; workers telecommute/live outside city

Step 3: Choose the idea.

Whilst brainstorming ideas, several ideas should come to your head. You need to choose one for each question you need to answer. However, before you decide to go with an idea, ask yourself these questions:

• Does my idea relate exactly to the question?
• Can I explain this idea with reasons and examples? (It is better to choose an idea that you can explain clearly over your best idea.)
• Is it a simple idea? (You have limited time and words to explain your idea. If the idea is too complex you will not be able to develop it fully and this will cost you points! A simple idea can still impress the examiner as long as you develop it well and provide relevant reasons and examples.)

Step 4: Write down short notes around your chosen ideas.

In the ‘Problem + Solution’ type question in IELTS Task 2 writing, there are usually two questions that need to be answered. You must first come up with an idea that answers the first question, and then provide an example that backs up that idea. Then you must come up with an idea for the second question and provide and example that backs up the second idea. Below are the ideas I went with and the examples I created on the above IELTS writing Task 2 question.

Q2: Limit rent prices, government support for poor Reason: Rent limits = more affordable hosing, support for poor = poor have more money for living/rent Example: Food subsidy = less money spent on food = more money for housing

Step 5: Start writing!

Now that you have the main ideas confirmed, your essay is practically written. The Q1 and Q2 notes can form two body paragraphs! And you can have a similar two body paragraph outline for other question types. For Advantage/disadvantage, for instance, you might have one body paragraph for advantages and one for disadvantages.

Just follow this simple formula for constructing your essay and you will complete Task 2 within 40 minutes. And to see how this formula worked for a full essay based on the outline above, check out a full sample response based on the question and notes above . I would also encourage you to look at similarly structured responses for common IELTS Writing Task 2 question types .

Again, brainstorming and prewriting a brief outline serve as the foundation for all of those model essays. Brainstorming may seem like a lot of work to start, but trust me, by brainstorming and planning your ideas first, you will save time and energy in the long run. By building this strong foundation, your essays will actually become easier to write, and you’ll be able to write them more quickly!

IELTS Essay Topics with Answers: Let’s Practice!

Practice makes perfect! Work with a variety of essay topics for IELTS to brainstorm the types of ideas that would best answer the questions. Here are just a few IELTS writing topics with answers (IELTS Academic) to get you started!

• Advantage/Disadvantage Essay
• Two-Part Question Essay
• Discussion Essay
• Agree/Disagree Essay
• You may wish to write your own response for each topic before you read the sample essay/model answers.

A Final Word on IELTS Task 2 Topics

The more you practice English writing topics for the IELTS, the easier it will be to brainstorm and find essay topics for IELTS! This will take a lot of the pressure and stress off of you as you focus on IELTS essay questions.

As you practice, keep in mind that you should stick to one idea and one example per paragraph! On the IELTS test, too many ideas and examples complicate your essay. By separating your IELTS Writing Task 2 topics into a clear, efficient organizational structure, you’ll show the IELTS examiners exactly how great your ideas actually are!

Eliot Friesen-Meyers is the Senior Curriculum Manager for Magoosh IELTS and TOEFL. He attended Goshen College (B.A.), New York University (M.A.), and Harvard University (M.T.S.), gaining experience and skills in curriculum development, ESOL instruction, online teaching and learning, and IELTS and TOEFL test prep education. Eliot’s teaching career started with Literacy Americorps in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and later, taught ESL programs at Northeastern University, University of California-Irvine, and Harold Washington College. Eliot was also a speaker at the 2019 TESOL International Conference . With over 10 years of experience, he understands the challenges students face and loves helping them overcome those challenges. Come join Eliot on Youtube , Facebook , and Instagram . Recent blog posts Complete Guide to IELTS Writing Task 1 Complete Guide to IELTS Writing Task 2

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20 responses to “Brainstorming Essay Topics for IELTS Writing Task 2”

How get eassly 6 band in ielts .when you have only one month time only.

That depends a lot on what your current IELTS performance is. Your exact one-month study plan should focus on your weaknesses while building on your strengths.

It definitely is possible to get a good score on the IELTS in a month though, and many students have gotten a 6 or higher with just one month of study. Here on the blog, we have a few posts about one month IELTS study plans. See Kuangyan’s weekly IELTS study template , and her general advice for one month of IELTS study .

Hi my IELTS score is L 5.5 R 3.5 W 5.5 S 5.5 overall 5.0 can I go for rechecking because I need 5 to get admission.

I’m afraid that we can’t provide any more advice than what we already wrote in this blog post. I recommend that you read it carefully and take a look at some of the earlier comments before you make any decisions 🙂

I got 5.5 score bt i wanna got each 6 score then how can i get 6each score plz tell me

There’s no simple answer to that question, Seerat. After all, the best way to improve depends on your own strengths and weaknesses in IELTS Writing Task 2. Fortunately, Magoosh now offers a complete guide to IELTS Writing Task 2 . That guide should have some tips that will work for you personally as you boost your IELTS score by a half-band. 🙂

Result of 23 Sept exam was L-6.5 R-6.5 W-6 S-5.5 After EOR in speaking band score increased by 5.5 to 6.5

Thank you for sharing your experience!

Declared result of 23 Sept exam L-6.5 R-6.5 W-6 S-5.5 After EOR L-6.5 R-6.5 W-6 S-6.5

I’m wondering, if “one idea and one example per paragraph” is enough, and you could lose points for that?

I often see in most blogs or essay examples, they suggest to provide a few ideas and examples per paragraph.

Also, could I generally stick to this template ( https://magoosh.com/ielts/the-best-ielts-task-2-writing-template/ ) EVERY TIME and for ALL type of task 2 questions for a 8+ score?

By the way, I enjoyed reading this blog, very nice work!

I generally do recommend sticking to one idea and one supporting detail per paragraph, because it keeps the essay simple. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the essay will have fewer ideas and details. It can simply mean that the essay has more paragraphs, since each paragraph can only have one idea and one detail.

If you want to write more complex paragraphs, that’s certainly alright… provided you can do a good job writing them. Use more complicate paragraphs carefully, as they are– of course– a bit more difficult to write.

Hi Gwendolyn, thank you for helping out all those who are aspiring to take IELTS exam. I would appreciate if you could please give feedback on below attempt for writing task 2. Thank you in advance 🙂

“Prevention is better than cure”. Researching and treating diseases is too costly so it would be better to invest in preventative measures. To what extent do you agree?

“It is better to be safe than sorry”, treatment of diseases is not affordable in today’s world, rather being precautious and opting for spending on measures to stay healthy is ideal option. In my opinion, it is important to maintain good health than spending on expensive treatments later on. Though, we cannot ignore the importance of science and research to cure deadly diseases. For instance, tuberculosis, heart attack, kidney transplant etcetera. People suffering from above mentioned diseases can only be saved by the access of medical science, surely the treatment is expensive, but when it comes to life, nothing is too pricey. However, cost involved in taking preventative measures is much cheaper than curing the disease. To illustrate, diseases like malaria, dengue, typhoid are very easy to catch, especially, in rainy season. Curing such diseases is not affordable, it is therefore, best to invest in precautionate devices such as mosquito killing machines, maintaining hygiene in and around house, wearing clothes to cover body areas that are prone to mosquito bites. Furthermore, the pain of treatment and the side effects of medications is far more adverse. For instance, treating an ankle that got fractured in the gym is more painful than wearing personal protective equipment during exercise, which could avoid such injuries, so it makes more sense to invest in ppe than to pay for treating injuries, which occur due to failure of taking prevention. To conclude, I agree that being cautious about our health and well-being is very important but the progress made by science and research in treating serious illness is invaluable too. People should enforce safety, to keep healthy, or else, they have no option but to go for dearer treatments which don’t come without side effects.

I enjoyed this article as it is very clear.

FYI i just wanted to point out a couple of typos in case you want to correct them:

with all the possible ideas that come to instantly come to your mind.(step 2)

your easy will relate to the task response(step 5)

Thanks again,

Thanks for your kind words on this article, Chris. And thanks for bringing these typos to my attention! I just fixed them. 🙂

mam my reading section is not improving please help me in that part how i can achieve good band score in reading

How you can improve in IELTS Reading depends a lot on your current Reading challenges. Fortunately, Magoosh has a Complete Guide to IELTS Reading that should help you with any challenge you’re facing. 🙂

Thanks for this helpful content. I have a question and I’ll appreciate if you can make it clear for me.

Can I explain more than one idea for each question? For example and for this sample question I have 2 ideas around the questions (lack of exercising and eating junk food).

Is it possible to explain both ideas for each question or I have to choose only one of these ideas?

You can certainly have more than one idea for the question. You can write 2 different body paragraphs explaining your examples. 🙂 Having more support for your viewpoint on the Task 2 essay can make your essay stronger. With that said, you should make sure that both of your ideas address the prompt and are very clear for the reader/grader to understand.

I secured S 7, L 6, W 6, R 5.5, I need 6 in Reading. Should I fill rechecking form ?

Hi Shefali,

There are usually no changes to the reading score even after a re-score. So, it’d probably be a better use of your time to retake the exam than request a re-score of the Reading section.

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Your Best College Essay

Maybe you love to write, or maybe you don’t. Either way, there’s a chance that the thought of writing your college essay is making you sweat. No need for nerves! We’re here to give you the important details on how to make the process as anxiety-free as possible.

What's the College Essay?

When we say “The College Essay” (capitalization for emphasis – say it out loud with the capitals and you’ll know what we mean) we’re talking about the 550-650 word essay required by most colleges and universities. Prompts for this essay can be found on the college’s website, the Common Application, or the Coalition Application. We’re not talking about the many smaller supplemental essays you might need to write in order to apply to college. Not all institutions require the essay, but most colleges and universities that are at least semi-selective do.

How do I get started?

Look for the prompts on whatever application you’re using to apply to schools (almost all of the time – with a few notable exceptions – this is the Common Application). If one of them calls out to you, awesome! You can jump right in and start to brainstorm. If none of them are giving you the right vibes, don’t worry. They’re so broad that almost anything you write can fit into one of the prompts after you’re done. Working backwards like this is totally fine and can be really useful!

What if I have writer's block?

You aren’t alone. Staring at a blank Google Doc and thinking about how this is the one chance to tell an admissions officer your story can make you freeze. Thinking about some of these questions might help you find the right topic:

• What is something about you that people have pointed out as distinctive?
• If you had to pick three words to describe yourself, what would they be? What are things you’ve done that demonstrate these qualities?
• What’s something about you that has changed over your years in high school? How or why did it change?
• What’s something you like most about yourself?
• What’s something you love so much that you lose track of the rest of the world while you do it?

If you’re still stuck on a topic, ask your family members, friends, or other trusted adults: what’s something they always think about when they think about you? What’s something they think you should be proud of? They might help you find something about yourself that you wouldn’t have surfaced on your own.  

How do I grab my reader's attention?

It’s no secret that admissions officers are reading dozens – and sometimes hundreds – of essays every day. That can feel like a lot of pressure to stand out. But if you try to write the most unique essay in the world, it might end up seeming forced if it’s not genuinely you. So, what’s there to do? Our advice: start your essay with a story. Tell the reader about something you’ve done, complete with sensory details, and maybe even dialogue. Then, in the second paragraph, back up and tell us why this story is important and what it tells them about you and the theme of the essay.

THE WORD LIMIT IS SO LIMITING. HOW DO I TELL A COLLEGE MY WHOLE LIFE STORY IN 650 WORDS?

Don’t! Don’t try to tell an admissions officer about everything you’ve loved and done since you were a child. Instead, pick one or two things about yourself that you’re hoping to get across and stick to those. They’ll see the rest on the activities section of your application.

I'M STUCK ON THE CONCLUSION. HELP?

If you can’t think of another way to end the essay, talk about how the qualities you’ve discussed in your essays have prepared you for college. Try to wrap up with a sentence that refers back to the story you told in your first paragraph, if you took that route.

SHOULD I PROOFREAD MY ESSAY?

YES, proofread the essay, and have a trusted adult proofread it as well. Know that any suggestions they give you are coming from a good place, but make sure they aren’t writing your essay for you or putting it into their own voice. Admissions officers want to hear the voice of you, the applicant. Before you submit your essay anywhere, our number one advice is to read it out loud to yourself. When you read out loud you’ll catch small errors you may not have noticed before, and hear sentences that aren’t quite right.

ANY OTHER ADVICE?

Be yourself. If you’re not a naturally serious person, don’t force formality. If you’re the comedian in your friend group, go ahead and be funny. But ultimately, write as your authentic (and grammatically correct) self and trust the process.

And remember, thousands of other students your age are faced with this same essay writing task, right now. You can do it!

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IELTS Daily Essay Topic: Most teenagers today own a smartphone.

• Updated on  
• May 20, 2024

Brainstorming Ideas

Refer to the following brainstorming ideas to get a better understanding of the answer.

• Advantages of Smartphones:
• A powerful tool for education.
• It helps teenagers stay connected with their peers and teachers.
• Helps in developing digital literacy skills.
• Provides people with a platform for creative expression.

2. Disadvantages of Smartphones:

• Over-reliance on smartphones.
• Spending excessive time on social media or playing games.
• Constant internet exposure can subject teenagers to inappropriate content and cyberbullying.
• It causes physical health issues and impacts their social skills and relationships with others.

Q. Most teenagers today own a smartphone. Provide your opinion to discuss the advantages and disadvantages.

Ans . In the contemporary world, it is an undeniable fact that most teenagers possess smartphones. This phenomenon has both merits and demerits that are worth discussing.

On a positive note, smartphones serve as a powerful tool for education. They provide access to a wide array of information and educational resources. For instance, numerous educational applications and websites are available at their fingertips, which can significantly improve their learning process. Moreover, smartphones enable teenagers to stay connected with their peers and teachers, facilitating collaborative learning and instant communication. Additionally, smartphones can help in developing digital literacy skills, which are essential in today’s technology-driven world. It also provides people with a platform for creative expression, allowing teenagers to explore and share their interests through photography, blogging and other forms of digital media.

However, the detrimental impacts of smartphones on teenagers cannot be overlooked. Teenagers can become overly dependent on smartphones, spending excessive time on social media or playing games, leading to a decline in academic performance. Furthermore, constant internet exposure can subject teenagers to inappropriate content and cyberbullying, threatening their mental health. Excessive screen time can also cause physical health issues like eye strain and poor posture. Additionally, constant connectivity can interfere with face-to-face social interactions, potentially impacting their social skills and relationships.

To conclude, while smartphones can be beneficial for teenagers in terms of educational purposes and connectivity, it is crucial to address the potential drawbacks.  It is the responsibility of parents and educators to guide teenagers on the appropriate use of smartphones, ensuring a balance between digital engagement and other aspects of life. 

Paraphrased Statement: In the contemporary world, it is an undeniable fact that most teenagers possess smartphones.

Thesis Statement: This phenomenon has both merits and demerits that are worth discussing.

Body Paragraph 1-Topic Sentences: On a positive note, smartphones serve as a powerful tool for education. They provide access to a wide array of information and educational resources. For instance, numerous educational applications and websites are available at their fingertips, which can significantly improve their learning process.

Body Paragraph 1- Supporting Reasons and Explanations: Moreover, smartphones enable teenagers to stay connected with their peers and teachers, facilitating collaborative learning and instant communication. Additionally, smartphones can help in developing digital literacy skills, which are essential in today’s technology-driven world. It also provides people with a platform for creative expression, allowing teenagers to explore and share their interests through photography, blogging and other forms of digital media.

Body Paragraph 2- Topic sentence: However, the detrimental impacts of smartphones on teenagers cannot be overlooked. Teenagers can become overly dependent on smartphones, spending excessive time on social media or playing games, leading to a decline in academic performance.

Body paragraph 2- Supporting Reasons and Explanations: Furthermore, constant internet exposure can subject teenagers to inappropriate content and cyberbullying, threatening their mental health. Excessive screen time can also cause physical health issues like eye strain and poor posture. Additionally, constant connectivity can interfere with face-to-face social interactions, potentially impacting their social skills and relationships. Conclusion: To conclude, while smartphones can be beneficial for teenagers in terms of educational purposes and connectivity, it is crucial to address the potential drawbacks.  It is the responsibility of parents and educators to guide teenagers on the appropriate use of smartphones, ensuring a balance between digital engagement and other aspects of life.

Vocabulary in Use

Linkers and connectors used:.

Following are the linkers and connectors used:

• On a positive note
• For instance
• Additionally
• On the negative side
• Furthermore
• Apart from this
• To conclude

Are you preparing for IELTS? Check out this video to improve your writing skills for the IELTS exam given below👇.

Download the Leverage IELTS App today.

Need help preparing for IELTS? Check out the best  IELTS preparation courses  in the market offered in a live training environment by trusted educators. If you want to help  studying abroad , call 1800572130 .

Purti Chawla

Purti is a CELTA, British Council, and IDP-certified language trainer. Having worked as a Study Abroad Test Prep Expert for the past 7 years, she has guided thousands of students towards their desirable scores in IELTS, TOEFL, GRE, GMAT and other language proficiency tests to study abroad. She is adept in molding learning strategies according to the needs of the learners and has built multiple courses at Leverage IELTS with result-oriented strategies. Proficient in test prep courses such as IELTS, TOEFL, PTE, and Duolingo, she loves to explore different classroom teaching methods, keeps continuously improving her own skills, and stays abreast with the latest teaching methodologies. She is a master trainer at Leverage Edu and aims to help thousands more through her expertise.

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Guide to Using Microsoft Copilot with Commercial Data Protection for UNSW Students

Welcome to your quick guide on effectively using Microsoft's AI tool, Copilot.

Microsoft Copilot is one of many generative AI tools. Each AI tool is slightly different. UNSW is providing Copilot free to students and the advantage of Copilot with Commercial Data Protection, compared to other Generative AI tools, is your data is protected, meaning it is safer to use than free versions. It also offers some features available only on paid versions of other generative AI platforms.

This information will help you understand the opportunities Generative AI offers when you use critical and reflective thinking to evaluate its output:

• Explain how to navigate through Copilot’s different modes 
• Remind you of AI’s limitations 
• Offer some prompt ideas to learn how to test Copilot’s capabilities. 
• Remind you of responsible and ethical use of AI

Copilot’s Modes

• Creative Mode: Best for brainstorming and generating innovative ideas. Use this when you’re looking for inspiration or an unconventional approach. Creative mode also utilises a more recent version of ChatGPT than the other modes.
• Balanced Mode: This is the default setting, providing a mix of creativity and accuracy. Ideal for most academic tasks.
• Precise Mode: Use this when you need detailed, specific information. It focuses on accuracy and detail, which is perfect for technical explanations and data analysis. In addition, precise mode also utilises ChatGPT.

For more information on how to use Microsoft Copilot with Commercial Data Protection, please take a look at the AI@UNSW page on My IT .

Understanding Copilot's Limitations

• Context Understanding : While Copilot is good at following instructions, it may not fully grasp the deeper context or nuances of complex academic subjects.
• Up-to-Date Information : Copilot’s training data has a cutoff time, meaning it might not have the latest research or current events.
• Bias and Errors : Copilot, as with all AI, can inherit biases and incorrect information . This means it might generate incorrect, biased or misleading information or content. Always cross-verify information with trusted sources. All references cited by AI should be verified to ensure the information is correct.

Prompt Ideas to Try

• Summarise Information : "Summarise the key points of this article in bullet points."
• Generate Questions : "What are some critical questions one should ask after reading this chapter?"
• Concept Explanation : "Explain the concept of [complex topic] in simple terms for a beginner."
• Comparative Analysis : "Compare and contrast [Topic A] and [Topic B] in terms of [specific criteria]."

Testing Copilot’s Capabilities

• Create an Image : Try asking it the following prompt: “create a diagram showcasing the neural networks of the human brain”.
• Familiar Paper Test : Find a paper you know well and ask, copy and paste the text into Copilot with the following prompt: "Explain how this paper might be useful to, or important to understand for, the average University student." This test demonstrates Copilot’s ability to interpret and explain academic papers.  You can then ask yourself, Has any critical or important information been left out? Made up or misrepresented?” “Has the output resulted in a response that is in line with what I might have crafted myself?

How to be responsible with AI and use it ethically

By using the above tests and prompts, you can get a better sense of how Copilot functions and how it can be utilised effectively in your studies. Remember, Copilot is a tool to enhance your learning experience, not a replacement for your own hard work and understanding. Feel free to explore and experiment with Copilot, and always strive to use this powerful tool responsibly and effectively.

• Check with Your Course Coordinator: Before using Copilot in your assignments, ensure it's permitted by your course guidelines.
• Use for Drafting and Brainstorming: Utilise Copilot to help generate ideas, outline essays, or start projects.
• Improve Learning: Ask Copilot to explain complex concepts in simpler terms or provide examples to clarify difficult points.
• Cite Your Sources: If you use information provided by Copilot, make sure to try and verify and cite the original sources appropriately. For more information on how to reference AI responses refer to UNSW AI referencing guidelines .

These actions should be avoided. They have a negative impact on learning and marks:

• Don’t plagiarise : Never submit AI-generated text or images as your own original work without proper attribution.
• Don’t cut and paste from AI : AI does not have the human skills of common sense, and critical and creative thinking. These will be lacking in your work if you do not use your human-only skills in interacting with AI. Also, AI plagiarises work from other places, and you may fall into the trap of plagiarising if you do cut and paste.

Don’t believe AI : Always double-check Copilot’s suggestions for potential errors, biases or outdated information. Be very careful with references – these are rarely correct and are often invented by AI. All references cited by AI should be verified to ensure the information is correct.

Ethical and Responsible Use of Artificial Intelligence at UNSW

Head here to see a practical one-page guide on how to use Gen AI responsibly in your studies.

Use of AI for assessments

Chat gpt & generative ai at unsw, referencing and acknowledging the use of artificial intelligence tools.

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College in the Age of AI

• Categories: Academics , Alumni
• Type: Articles
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By Erin Peterson / Illustrations by Marcos Chin

Generative artificial intelligence has come on strong. What does that mean for teaching and learning?

Spanish and Portuguese instructor Claudia Giannini remembers the moment when a new artificial intelligence tool upended her teaching.

It instantly translated short texts, giving students in language classes a potential shortcut. “Although still imperfect, it was such a huge jump from previous machine translation systems. It was impressive,” she recalls. “But it was also a problem in the classroom.” She knew she’d have to change some of the teaching techniques she’d relied on for years, and fast.

Giannini’s experience may sound like many professors’ reaction to the November 2022 launch of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot that communicates by text in uncannily human ways. Instead, it was 2016, the year that Google released its neural machine translation service with the support of deep learning, the model on which today’s generative AI technology is based.

While it was true that Google Translate couldn’t artfully translate a poem or literary work (or even a newspaper article), it could quickly translate some of the written assignments students typically tackle as they learn the basic building blocks of a foreign language. And for some of these students, it could seem like an easy way out of assignments.

Giannini quickly adjusted her approach. She started weighting class participation more heavily in student grades. She swapped out many written assessments with oral ones. She had students write the first draft of their essays in class. And she strategized with her colleagues, who were facing similar challenges.

In some ways, Giannini has had a head start on understanding the transformative impact of AI in the classroom. She sees both the technology’s challenges and its potential. And as a new crop of generative AI tools—from ChatGPT to GitHub Copilot—affect education in nearly every discipline, it’s a topic that almost no one in the classroom can avoid today.

At Macalester, professors and students are not digging in their heels against the changes these tools will bring, but are instead stepping mindfully into this new world.

The future starts now

Generative AI—artificial intelligence that creates new material based on patterns it identifies in data—was barely on the radar for most faculty and students as late as October 2022. But it wasn’t long before higher education as a whole was on high alert. “I read the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed every morning,” says professor of international relations and political theory Andrew Latham. “And the level of anxiety around AI, on a scale of one to ten, is an eleven.”

Although robust data is still relatively rare and change is happening quickly, early surveys suggest that AI is already influencing higher education. Two surveys conducted in August 2023, for example, found that anywhere between 20 and 38 percent of American college students were using AI tools at least monthly. Meanwhile, a survey of hundreds of Harvard University faculty members in the spring of 2023 found that just 21 percent believed AI would have a positive impact on education; 47 percent believed the impact would be negative.

At Macalester, attitudes continue to evolve. Professor of environmental studies Chris Wells, for example, admits he was dismissive of ChatGPT when he first tested it. “I had it write a bad poem—it was like a parlor trick,” he recalls. When he gave ChatGPT one of his own assignments, it returned nothing more than “slick sounding BS” that wouldn’t pass muster in his classes.

But he kept tabs on the technology, and he began to see examples of more meaningful uses of the tool.

He finally was convinced to take ChatGPT more seriously when he heard a podcaster frame resistance to the new technology as a liability, not a moral high ground. “They said that in academia, they call the use of generative AI cheating, but in business, they call it creativity and innovation,” he says. “I just don’t see a future in which AI doesn’t become a standard part of how people think, write, and communicate. We have to figure out what it means to live in this new world.”

This past spring, in his upper-level research and writing course, “US Urban Environmental History,” he and his students have had in-depth conversations about the ethics and opportunities of using these generative AI tools.

In one class, for example, he asked students to share what made them most uneasy about using ChatGPT and similar technology. They identified a range of issues: its significant energy use, large language model training practices that benefit from copyrighted work in unethical ways, and its facilitation of plagiarism, for starters.

But they also discussed reasons to be excited about these opportunities, as well as the ethics of avoiding a technology so powerful that it could fundamentally disrupt society. “There’s a lot of hype to generative AI, but there’s also a ‘there’ there,” Wells says. “And we’re all just trying to figure that out.”

AI attempts to replicate a human artist

We hired illustrator Marcos Chin of Brooklyn, N.Y. to illustrate artwork for this story. Then we fed AI image generators a prompt to see what they came up with, and compared the two approaches on this page. Chin wrote about the experience: “I saw this as an opportunity to dig into what my strengths are as a human being—an artist. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to compete with AI in regard to speed and the amount of sketches I could make in a short period of time. But what I did have was just that—time. I had time to feel, to remember, to think, to ruminate. I spent some days thinking about concepts while pacing around my apartment, walking my dog, and having conversations with my partner. Moreover, I also knew that I had lived experiences, and opinions about this topic which informed my approach.”

Sketches by Marcos Chin / Images generated by Adobe Firefly

Finding the right balance

After ChatGPT’s public rollout in late 2022, Macalester faculty were immediately interested in grappling with the challenges of generative AI. By January 2023, the Serie Center for Scholarship and Teaching had organized a panel and faculty discussion about AI and teaching. Britt Abel, director of writing and a co-organizer of the event, describes the turnout for the event as “massive.”

The interest encouraged Abel and associate library director Mozhdeh Khodarahmi to form a working group and faculty and staff learning committee on AI. That led to a report on AI literacy and critical thinking. The report includes robust guidance for faculty and students, and has been praised by the Macalester community—as well as national and even international audiences.

The working group has hosted ongoing presentations with energetic discussions about the ways that instructors and students can harness the power of these tools effectively to improve their teaching and learning.

For students, AI tools can make beginning an assignment less intimidating. Ada Bruno ’24 (Cranston, R.I.), who teamed up with two students to write a paper about the use of AI at Macalester for a news reporting and writing course, says she has used AI to help her do early thinking on some projects. “If I need an idea for a project, it can be helpful for brainstorming,” she says.

Still, she admits that its limitations are abundantly clear, even with relatively simple, clearly delineated tasks. “It’ll come up with ten ideas, but it doesn’t have the same kind of energy or collaborative spirit as a face-to-face interaction,” she says.

Faculty, too, have found ways to use the tools to support their teaching. For example, Giannini has been using ChatGPT in her advanced classes. First, she asks students to analyze an issue or a text related to a class topic the way she did before the advent of generative AI. Then, she has them ask ChatGPT the same questions she posed to the class and critique its output. “They can see how much better they do in their own analyses—and they can also see how much ChatGPT ‘hallucinates’,” she says, referring to the false information that can be created by these large language models.

Abel, who also is a professor of German, says the tools can be very valuable to faculty who are early in their teaching careers. For example, a professor could ask an AI tool to provide them a detailed list of potential classroom activities, such as a movie analysis or a cooking class, to support student learning at a specific language level. They could also ask ChatGPT to create a rubric to help assess student learning for this activity. “It’s pretty powerful at putting together a rubric if you’re using nationally accepted standards and coming up with specific activities related to those standards,” she says.

Wells says he finds ChatGPT most useful when he imagines it as another person. “If you use the analogy of an intern, you can think of ChatGPT as someone who works very hard and very quickly, and who is so eager to please that they will make stuff up in order to try to satisfy you,” he says.

With that mindset, he says, faculty and students can reorient their approach to the technology. For Wells, that means that he spends a significant amount of time defining the task or question in clear and often excruciatingly granular detail. He’s even developed a seven-point template that he uses for prompts that includes identifying the audience, specifying style and tone, and using examples for clarity.

This is work that requires its own unique type of thinking and analysis, and students benefit from learning these skills, says Wells. “There are so many details we don’t think to stipulate, but the AI still has to decide for you,” he explains. “It’s when those default decisions don’t line up with what you want that you often get a bad output.”

Of course, there’s a fine line between getting help from an AI tool and plagiarism. It’s why the Macalester working group developed an updated academic integrity statement that bars the unauthorized use of generative AI tools in coursework.

Still, while AI-facilitated plagiarism has been one of the most significant concerns for many educators and institutions, Abel says that Macalester’s structure, philosophy, and processes give the institution distinct advantages in an AI world. “Our faculty design really good writing assignments. We have small class sizes. We have students free write and brainstorm before they write an essay, and we have them write what writer Anne Lamott calls ‘sh***y first drafts.’ We spend a lot of time on writing, which is an iterative process, and as a result, we know our students’ voices.”

And while professors are quick to acknowledge that they would be hard pressed to detect AI cheating, they also know that the students who come to Macalester are typically hungry to do the kind of rigorous academic work that the college requires.

Latham says he often uses an athletic analogy when he talks to students about their use of AI. “If you decided that you were going to do a triathlon, and you had access to the best gym and the best coaches in the world, and you paid a bunch of money to do it, why on earth would you have someone else do the workouts for you?” he asks. “I tell them: Your education is a big investment, so make the most of it.”

I am not a robot

If AI tools have shaken up teaching and learning, they have also opened up opportunities. In some cases, they’re leading professors to rethink how they teach.

Before ChatGPT, for example, Latham had focused on having students complete traditional writing assignments. He has since replaced many of these projects with reflection papers and invitations for his students to come to his office to discuss their growth as scholars and as people. “I tell them that this is not a moment for me to judge you and to grade you. This is a moment for you to reflect on what you have actually learned,” he says. “And these papers and conversations are fantastic. I get the strong sense, in a way that I never have before, that they’re experiencing real growth as human beings. They’re not just ticking boxes and pretending that they know what I talked to them about three weeks ago.”

He pauses. “Are these reflection papers AI-proof? Probably not. But it’s pretty hard to ask an AI to write about what you’ve learned,” he says. “These are wonderful pedagogical moments, and I wish I would have done this twenty-five years ago.”

It’s this part of the AI transformation—the thoughtful analysis about what teaching and learning can look like, the re-engineering of classes to encourage critical thinking in new ways, and the increasing focus on human connection that is central to a Macalester education—that gives Latham hope about what lies ahead. “It’s not all rosy,” he says. “We’ll have to change things. We’ll have to adapt. But we can be true to our liberal arts heritage and tradition. Even in an AI world.”

Artificial intelligence (AI). Technology that simulates human intelligence, often by mimicking communication and decision-making.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). Technology that searches for patterns in large amounts of data to generate new material, such as text, code, and images.

Hallucination. Incorrect or nonsensical information generated by an AI system because of limitations in its training data or algorithms.

Large language model (LLM). A type of generative artificial intelligence that is focused on text-based data and algorithms.

Prompt. A specific instruction or question humans give an artificial intelligence system to guide an AI tool to generate a response, create content, or perform a task.

Erin Peterson is a Minneapolis-based writer.

May 17 2024

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