1001 Five-Paragraph Essay Project: Brainstorming
To do well on a project you should be prepared to spend time over several days to do your best work. You should plan to apply yourself to your project, take a break from it, and come back several times in order to polish and refine your work. The first step in the writing process is brainstorming. If you haven’t heard this word before, brainstorming simply means that you think of and come up with a variety of ideas in order to find one you’d like to use for your writing. Brainstorming may seem like it would be tedious and difficult, but it can actually be easy (and fun) depending on the type of brainstorming exercise you do.
Your goal for this project is to complete some brainstorming exercises and choose a topic that you will be writing about for your five-paragraph essay, which is due in a later unit. As you work on the exercises, understand that your essay can be persuasive (convincing) or expository (informative) in nature, and will be about 600-800 words long (about 2-3 pages). Because you will be spending a lot of time on your essay, you want to pick a topic that is interesting, specific, and worth writing about for the next several units. You want your final essay to be strong and interesting, one that readers are glad to spend time reading!
Your next two projects will teach you more about the writing process and will help guide you towards completing your essay, so it’s crucial you complete this project thoroughly and carefully. Keep in mind that the five paragraph essay is made up of an introduction, three body paragraphs that give support for your point, and a concluding paragraph.
1. Exercise One: Word Association
When brainstorming, you want to start with some very broad categories and work your way down to...