Basic techniques for generating ideas.

Brainstorming.

Brainstorming consists in writing series of words or sentences just as they flow from our mind, although they have no logical order or connections. Once the words are written down, we have to establish relationships among them. This is the embryo of the future text.

Free writing.

Free writing is a similar technique to the brainstorming. Consists in writing a text without previous decisions or ideas about how we want to write it. Just choosing a topic and writing about it, and then we can summarise the main ideas.

Organisation of information.

There are some basic rules for writing a well - structured text. The text should be organised in a clear way; it must not be a twisted or an incomprehensible lot of ideas. We have to try to write according to certain conventions about hoe the text is organised. We have to structure our text in paragraphs. Each paragraph must express one idea. Some rules referring to the paragraphs:

A paragraph must be clearly separated from other paragraphs, either by an empty line or by indenting the first line, or both.

There must be no blank spaces or half-empty lines inside the paragraph.

A paragraph in academic prose does not begin with a dot, a line or a kind of mark, except in special circumstances.

Each body paragraph must normally have a topic sentence, and more than one sentence.

Types of paragraphs.

The introductory paragraph.

There must be at least one, although there can be more than one. This paragraph is usually a generalisation. It is more or less true, imprecise and it is of relative little value unless it is backed up. But we have to take care with generalisations. We have always to try not to do an overgeneralization, and our generalisation must never include our opinion (there will be time for this later). We will have to avoid, also,