Creative and Critical Thinking
ASSIGNMENT 3: Generating Ideas for Writing
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Learning Target (Curricular Competencies):
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"I don't know what to write about" is often a huge hurdle for many writers. Writers sometimes experience a shortage of writing ideas, chaotic floods of ideas or no ideas at all that stalls writing projects.
Task: Open a new document, title it 2.3 Generating Ideas for Writing and complete the following tasks:
1. 60 second freewrite:
Freewriting involves letting your thoughts flow freely on paper or your computer screen. Use the Random Word site to get a word to free write about. Write whatever comes to your mind. Don't worry about typos, spelling or any other surface-level issues of grammar and style.
When you are done, read through what you have written. You will no doubt find a lot of filler in your text, but there will also be golden nuggets of insights, discoveries and other little gems in there that you can pick out and develop for your projects. Even if you don't discover any new idea nuggets, you will stir up your creative mind and unearth bits of raw concepts buried deep in your mind you can develop.
2. Listing: If you want to write about a specific topic or communicate a certain idea, jot down a list of single words and phrases that relate to the general topic you are thinking about off the top of your mind. Pick one topic from this list and write as many words or phrases that you can think of that are related. (minimum twenty)
3. Take your list created in number two and organize the ideas into groups with a category heading. Think of some categories like products, people, careers, problems, places, education to add and then try and add some new ideas or phrases.
4. Questions: Choose a social issue and write some questions starting with: (might be factual: Who started the women's rights movement? or opinion: What makes some people think that racism is okay? or a hypothesis: What if everybody stopped buying a certain brand? etc.)
A. Who...
B. What....
C. Why....
D. I wonder....
E. What if....
F. How....
Assessment: Below you will find the exemplary criteria used to assess the assignment.
Learning Target: (Exemplary 6/6): Exemplary comprehension of the task and clear accomplishment of the objective. All tasks are complete, organized as specified, and thoughtful.
Submission
Use the "1.3 Generating Ideas for Writing" link on the main page of this section of the course to upload your assignment to your teacher for marking.