Advanced Writing for the College-Bound

Unit 3: Getting Ideas

Collecting Your Thoughts

For the purposes of this course, we don’t need to think of impossible things, but it is occasionally useful to think of absurd or unlikely things, just to get the creative and analytic processes working. The process of coming up with ideas under the heading of a general topic or a specific agenda (such as the defense of someone in court) was generally classified by Roman rhetoricians as inventio, and by the Greeks as εὕρησις (heuresis), and some early modern English rhetorical theorists talk about it as “invention”. The arrangement of the parts, once they have been discovered or contrived was generally classed as dispositio or τάξις (taxis). You may find this interesting or tedious, but it should be at least somewhat consoling to know that you’re not the first person ever to come up against the problem of banging your head into a recalcitrant topic.

Let’s choose one of those broad general questions again as an essay topic: What is literature?

As usual, we start with making a thesis statement: Literature, which includes those stories passed orally or in print from generation to generation, provides a society with examples of common experiences and suggests answers to issues that face every human being

Now that you have a point you want to make, it’s time to get out the evidence. Presumably, you chose this position because of some information you already have, even if it isn’t very articulate yet. However, in order to produce a good essay, you need to get that evidence into some coherent form.

You may want to use brainstorming before you have a coherent thesis statement, as a way of generating possible responses to a particular question. Sometimes this helps you narrow down the position you want to take. Brainstorming is also good for coming up with essay and research paper subjects when your instructor says something vague, like, “Write something about history...”

Brainstorming

One method of generating ideas when you don’t have a good starting point already is called brainstorming. Groups sometimes use this method to get a lot of ideas on the table, and then go through an evaluation process to see what sounds best. Whether you are working in a group or by yourself, when you brainstorm, write down everything that you can think of, no matter how silly it sounds. Culling (picking the best ideas) is the analytic and evaluation process that comes later. But generating ideas is a creative act; you need to write down everything because a “silly” idea may cause you to think of something that isn’t so silly, and two silly ideas may show a relationship that is important, and because exercising your critical faculty too soon tends to inhibit the operation of free intuition — which may lead to positive inspiration.

Here’s a list “off the top of my head” of ideas about things I consider possibly relevant to the definition of literature, generated by spending about five minutes doing some free-association:

Peter Rabbit

the expression of a culture

an historical record of the society’s values

a way to pass on wisdom and knowledge of experience (not simply information)

Huck Finn

The Lord of the Rings

Shakespeare

the Iliad

movies like Gone with the Wind

It’s often worth thinking also of counter-examples — in this case, things you don’t think qualify as literature:

pulp fiction

bad poetry

cereal box labels

badly written summaries of popular movies

Finally, you may want to list some of the problematic examples — things you’re not really sure about:

extensive newspaper/magazine articles

well-written reports of scientific experiments

well-written summaries of popular movies.

Freewriting

In brainstorming, the goal is to produce a list of things related to a given topic. In freewriting, you write for a set period of time in answer to a specific question. When you are freewriting in preparation for an essay on a set topic, you might want to write for five minutes on each of the following:

• What are all the reasons to support your thesis point of view?
• What are all the arguments that you can think of to refute your point of view?
• What is your audience like? You might want to describe what they know about the topic already, whether they will find your thesis acceptable or controversial, and what kinds of sources will be convincing to them.

Having a five-minute time limit forces you to think beyond the first couple of ideas that come to mind...if you are drawing a blank, five minutes can be a long time!

Mapping

Once you have your ideas down, you need to organize them according to topic. Group your ideas together into five or six areas and create a summary title for each group. In my brainstorming above, my list of examples fell into three groups: clear examples of literature, problematic possible examples of literature, and examples of writings that are not literature. They may not have emerged in that order, though — so this is the time to sort them out. There are at least two ways to do this:

If you are graphically inclined, you may want to draw "mind maps" by putting your ideas in clusters and drawing lines connecting ideas from one group to another. The mind-map is intrinsically not ordered. It allows you to group ideas without deciding (at least at this point) which one must go first, which second, and so on. Here’s an example of what we’ve come up with in a mind map:

The conventional outline is a more verbal, less graphical equivalent of mind-mapping. It has both the advantages and the disadvantages of being more linear. In arrangement. Here one builds a hierarchy of topics, and under each heading, a broken down list of areas it should cover. The value of the outline is that it is almost infinitely extensible — one can build an outline designed to encompass an entire book or seriese of books, or one can use it to sketch the shape of a single paragraph. Outlines can fit on a 3”x5” card, or they can take up whole volumes. Here’s the same material in an outline:

Literature Definition

    I. Expression of culture
        A. Historical record of society’s values
        B. A way to pass on wisdom and knowledge
    II. Examples
        A. Huckleberry Finn
        B. Lord of the Rings
        C. Shakespeare
        D. Iliad
        E. Movies like Gone with the Wind
    III. Problematic cases
        A. Extensive news reporting
        B. Well-written reports of scientific experiments
        C. Well-written summaries of popular movies
    IV. Counterexamples
        A. Pulp fiction
        B. Bad poetry
        C. Cereal box labels
        D. Badly written summaries of popular movies

One might choose to arrange this in any number of ways, by changing the order of the main elements or the subordinate elements, or regrouping some of the pieces, depending on where you expect it all to fit best:

Literature Definition

    I. Expression of culture
        A. Historical record of society’s values
        B. A way to pass on wisdom and knowledge
    II. Examples
        A. Iliad
        B. Shakespeare
        C. Huckleberry Finn
        D. Lord of the Rings
    III. Counterexamples
        A. Pulp fiction
        B. Bad poetry
        C. Cereal box labels
        D. Badly written summaries of popular movies
    IV. Problematic cases
        A. Extensive news reporting
        B. Well-written reports of scientific experiments
        C. Well-written summaries of popular movies
        D. Movies like Gone with the Wind

Building a conventional outline tends to suggest something about your intended order in the final product. This can restrict your thinking if you do it too early, but, then again, one really has to put it in some order, and that order must eventually be decided.

There is mind-mapping software out there for both Windows and Macintosh operating systems: if you find some you can work with and can afford, fine — but it’s also something one can do (perhaps a little more messily — but nobody else is going to be looking at your mind maps) with just a pencil and paper. Sometimes colored markers help, too.

There is also outlining software out there for both Windows and Macintosh operating systems. Microsoft Word has a (fairly clumsy) outliner built into it; for the Macintosh, OmniOutliner is a superb piece of work. There are others; some of them are freeware. Again, if you find some you can work with and can afford, feel free to use it. There are also some very tidy little numbers for both mind-mapping and for outlining on the iPhone or iPod Touch, though of course you don’t have a lot of room to maneuver.

Culling

Obviously, not all the ideas you produce by these methods are equally useful. So you need to go through the list and ask which of these examples are better, which are not so great? Which will work together best to support your thesis statement? Which are suitable for your particular audience? How must you limit your topic in order to meet deadlines, or length requirements?

Given that this is an essay you need to write in a relatively short period of time, you may want stick to the 5-paragraph framework: introduction, three supporting points (maybe one more), conclusion. One possible limitation is to eliminate works originally intended for dramatic presentation, like Shakespeare and better movies, although you might want to make a note of anything you came up with along those lines for treatment if you have a longer research assignment into a similar topic.

For considerations of organization and relationship to the thesis statement, you could chose to put the kinds of general definition statements into the introduction, so that’s where you would will say things like "expression of the culture," "historical record," and "transmission of wisdom from experience"--or maybe just transmission of the experience itself.

This leaves the actual examples of "works of literature": Peter Rabbit, Huckleberry Finn, The Lord of the Rings, The Iliad. On review, you note that while Peter Rabbit is a children’s book and maybe a good example of literature that doesn’t necessarily fit the standard mold, the Iliad, Huckleberry Finn, and The Lord of the Rings are products of three different cultures (Greek, American, British) in three different time periods (ancient, 19th, and 20th century). One natural way of organizing this material then is chronological, and you can start with the Iliad and end with The Lord of the Rings.

Now you need to determine what makes each of these examples "literature" according to your thesis statement:

what are the common concepts?

what are the universal problems?

what are the solutions the characters find to these problems

how do the individual examples reflect the values of the cultures that produced them?

Finally, review those items on your list that so far you’ve left out: Peter Rabbit, problematic examples and counter examples. It might be useful to consider briefly in the conclusion why Peter Rabbit might be literature (or might not), and why the problematic and counter examples are not good examples of literature even though they may be well written. This will help establish the boundaries by giving examples of things that are not literature.

While you may or may not have created a formal outline at this point, you should have a pretty good idea of where your essay is going and how your examples relate to the main point.

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