How to use brainstorming technique to write quickly and neatly

Factual descriptions, Article and Essay writing can be easily handled and organized by using a simple technique called Brainstorming.

You might be also interested in reading our previous articles like How to write factual descriptions and How to write articles, essays and speeches.

Brainstorming is actually an activity performed by a group of individuals to bring out creative ideas. Extending it to individuals, one can make a mind-map to organize ideas before penning them down.

It’s a common issue that when we write articles or essays, we miss few points and then insert them making the article look shabby. Since, presentation is the key here, we need a way to tackle it effectively.

Mistakes that occur when we write without organizing our ideas

To make it easier to digest, I will take an example and guide you through the process of brainstorming.

I was once asked in school to technically describe a computer. Analyzing it a little bit, we can find that technically describing something excludes all feelings, statements about style, etc. This is where brainstorming comes handy.

What we first do is to make a circle in the center of the page and write the topic title inside it, in our case its “COMPUTER”. Now jot down everything about computer by making lines emanating out from the circle.

Mind map illustration 

Don’t worry about whether the point is technical or not but write everything you know about it. You can see we even have a point about style included, which definitely doesn’t add to our technical description.

Now take a pencil, and circle all the points, which adds value to our job in hand i.e., technically describing computer.

With all the points in place, we can further go and add lines coming out from the sub points (the ones circled with pencil). This way we can enhance our content depending on the complexity of the subject in hand.

If we are going to have multiple paragraphs, multiple sub-points can be grouped together by identifying a common link. Say for example, I had points like Internet, Bluetooth, etc. in the mind map. I can simply club them up and make a single paragraph pertaining to connectivity.  

The process itself takes time to grow at first but once you get a hang of it, it’s simple and effectively cuts down the amount of time needed to produce content. Also, you will notice that this process gives much more control over the content flow.

The final outcome using the mind-map given above is as follows:

A computer is a computing device capable of carrying out complex operations. It consists of a monitor, keyboard, mouse and a CPU. CPU in turn has a motherboard, which acts as a backbone for all the operations. Computer can also be used as a communication device i.e., by using Internet and Bluetooth. Other peripheral devices like printers and scanners can be plugged into it with the help of dedicated ports and cables. Depending upon the operating system, different types of software can be installed to achieve tasks ranging from motion editing to abstract scientific calculations.