4 Brainstorming Techniques for the School Magazine

Brainstorming is an important step after preparing yourself. This stage of pre-writing follows once you have made up your mind about your article and how you would like to present it.

Now, you gather ideas, as many as you can. You can discard the useless ones later. You could use any of the following techniques or combine two of them.

 

Free Writing

Take a paper and start writing down your thoughts based on the theme. Let your thoughts fly and do not worry about spelling, punctuation or sequence. Write towards a goal- number of pages or  words.

 

Listing

Make a list of single words or phrases that are connected with your topic. Once you have a decent list ready, decide a few categories and place these words and phrases under their respective heads.

For non-fiction, make categories of arguments, opinions and facts.

For fiction, your categories could go like this- theme, people, place, goals, and obstacles.

 

Clustering

This brainstorming technique is used for establishing relationship between ideas of a topic. Place the main idea in a circle at the centre and related ideas in slightly smaller circles. Connect these circles to the main one. Each of these ideas may further lead to other ideas.

Brainstorming
Clustering is a Brainstorming Technique

Researching

You may like to visit a library or browse on the internet. Once you have your ideas you could either use the listing or the clustering method.

 

Asking Questions

This technique of brainstorming may work for you. Answer the following questions and you will have your ideas ready.

Who are the people involved?

What is the incident? What is the problem?

When did it take place? When does this problem need to be solved?

Why did it take place? Why is solving this problem important?

Where did it take place?

How did it happen? How was the problem solved?

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