Brainstorming and Outlining

(TESOL Worksheets--EAP Research Essay)

Google: drive, docs, pub

[This is for English for Academic Purposes students to help them brainstorm their ideas about their research project, and produce an outline.  The hints for writing a thesis, at the bottom of the paper, are not my own but taken from Pathways 4 published by National Geographic Learning  

In addition to the brainstorming activities below, I also sometimes use a freewriting worksheet: Google: drive, docs, pub]

Brainstorming

Step 1: 10 minutes.  Write down all the words that you can think of connected to your topic.  Don't worry about how you will use them, or whether they are important or not.  Just concentrate on writing down as many words as possible.

Step 2:  Now, see if you can find connections between any of your words.  Go through and try to connect similar words.  You may want to circle all of the connected words with the same color pen.

Step 3: Now, sort the words into different boxes.  In each box, put only words that are connected to each other.  (Sometimes you may use the same word in more than one box.)

Step 4:

Choose two or three boxes that you want to focus on for your paper.  Write down the related words again, and see if you can come up with a title for each category.

Title: ______________________________

Title: ______________________________

Title: ______________________________

Assignment:

Write an outline for your paper.  This can be a simple outline.  (That is, you do not need to include all of your supporting details at this point.) 

You should include:

* Your Thesis (the main idea or the main point of your essay)

* Your Outline of Structure/ Essay Map (A sentence which lists all the main points of your paper in the order that they will appear.  This usually is the last sentence in your introduction)

* Your main points.  (You do not need to include all of your supporting details).

Hints for writing a thesis:

Individual paragraphs have main ideas.  Similarly, essays have main ideas.  A thesis statement is a statement that expresses the main idea of an entire essay.  A good thesis has the following characteristics:

* It presents your position or opinion on the topic.

* It includes the reasons for your opinion or position on the topic.

* It expresses only the ideas that you can easily explain in your body paragraphs

* It includes key words that connect with the topic sentences of the body paragraphs

                                                                                                                                (Pathways 4, p. 42)