Brainstorming – Approach to writing an A+ grade assignment

Once you have successfully completed topic analysis, then the next step should be brainstorming exercise to bring all the possible ideas on the paper. Actually, this exercise taps your natural thinking process and then, channelize it into creating a ‘storm’ of ideas. These ideas in the form of diagrams and written words can then be converted quite easily with a good piece of writing. Brainstorming exercise can also be considered as the necessary step before you develop questions and plan to begin your research project.

Brainstorming can be useful for both the common situations you might generally encounter when you are trying to write an essay. These situations are:

You have nothing in your mind: This is the most commonly encountered situations when you feel that you are completely blank and don’t know what to start and how to start. In this kind of a situation, brainstorming definitely brings forth plenty of new ideas to begin with and provide the necessary inspiration for writing.

When too many things in mind: At times, you might find yourself completely confused in this kind of a situation, with too many chaotic ideas to handle. Brainstorming also found to be extremely useful in this case, to bring out all the chaos on a piece of paper and subsequently help you to find the necessary schema or logical patterns to begin the writing.

How to do brainstorming: There are different techniques or ways of carrying out a brainstorming exercise. I will try to highlight a few of the important ones in the following. But I would definitely urge you to be creative in terms of modifying these methods in terms of your own needs and convenience. In this regard, instead of just focusing on method, the most important thing should be that you understand the basic essence of brainstorming exercise. The following diagram more or less captures all the different ways of doing brainstorming:

(Source: The University of Queensland > Student Services > Brainstorming)

In the following, a few of important methods are discussed in details.

Free writing: For free writing, you just let the pen flow on the paper to jot down whatever is there in your mind. While free writing, you should not at all bother about grammar, spelling, or punctuation and write key words or ideas as they come. Generally keeping an arbitrary time limit (like 15 minutes) for this exercise will really help you to focus on writing and keep writing even if you think you are writing nothing. This method is really useful as it almost forces you to write something, instead of being over-critical about your own thought process. Thinking and reading critically is a necessary step when you structure your assignment, but not at the time of doing brainstorming. You should also understand other steps of completing an assignment.

Mind Map: Making mind map also helps one enormously to capture the brainstorming process quite precisely. You should first get acquainted with key features of mind maps and then how to create one.

Cubing: Just like a cube has six different sides, you should think about the following six different directions and try to answer them for the chosen topic.

1. Describe it.
2. Compare it.
3. Associate it.
4. Analyze it.
5. Apply it.
6. Argue for and against it.

Journalistic Questions: You can also try to answer the six big questions that all journalists use as the background for their research. These are 5 ‘W’ and 1 ‘H’, i.e. Who, What, When, Where, Why and How. Write these questions on a piece of paper with some blank space between each of them, where you can fill your response in the context of the topic.

As a concluding remark, I want to highlight the fact that don’t try to ignore this exercise as being silly, because the outcome of this exercise can help you significantly later on to plan your writing and eventually structure your assignment.

If you really find difficult to find some time to read all these steps and complete your assignment, then there are various top assignment help services to help you. You can just approach these assignment providers and give your requirements to them. They will come back to you with the best assignment services.