Using a writing process

2. Brainstorm

After analysing the task, it's time to brainstorm. Focus on noting what you already know about the topic, broad themes, connections, and any gaps in your knowledge (to guide your research).

You could try:

• Freewriting: set a timer for 5 to 10 minutes and write down everything that comes to mind about the topic, without stopping to make corrections
• Listing: create bulleted lists, eg of pros and cons, advantages and disadvantages, causes and effects, perspectives of stakeholder groups, signs and symptoms, process steps, rankings, examples, or any other relevant categories
• Mind mapping: start with a central idea and connect it to related topics, sub-concepts, or questions in a visual format
• Questioning: create 'who, what, where, when, why and how' questions about the topic. This will help to reveal where you have good understanding and where you may have gaps to fill.

3. Research (and reading)

The purpose of the research and reading stage is to gather the information you need to help you deepen your understanding and reach your own conclusions.

Using the keywords and questions from your brainstorm you then search for information, read critically to evaluate that information and identify themes, and synthesise these themes to help you form your own ideas.

Try using your brainstorm to draft a basic plan to help organise your research notes. This way you can:

• Transfer ideas directly into your plan as you read
• Capture bullet points of key information
• Note your thoughts or critique ideas you encounter
• Record brief reference details, such as author, year, and page number or DOI, so you can easily find and cite the sources you use later
• Refine, re-organise, change, delete and re-sequence ideas as you go.

Developing your critical thinking, reading, and note taking skills will help you to navigate this stage efficiently and effectively.

Note: Using AI tools to retroactively find sources that support an argument is not good academic practice. By searching only for resources that agree with your position, these tools may miss important context and leave out key alternative perspectives. Approaching your research in this way will also prevent you from gaining a full understanding of a topic.

For more information on using AI tools to find sources, see GenAI and Referencing.

4.  Plan

Often, the research and planning – and even writing – stages are not entirely linear.

For example, creating a basic plan from your brainstorm is often useful to help guide your research. As you read various sources and add notes to your plan, you may start to shift the order of ideas, or identify new concepts to add. Once you have a more detailed plan, or even once you have written your first draft, you may notice gaps that mean you need to go back and do some extra research.

Before you start writing an essay, your plan should set out:

• Your argument, or overall contention
• Points in support for your argument
• Points addressing the counterargument/s
• Evidence and reasoning for each idea.

These components could look different for different types of writing, so keep in mind the genre, aim and audience of your work as you write your plan.

For example, using the assignment task under 'Analyse your task', a starting plan (not including an introduction and conclusion) might look like this:

5. Write

You might be surprised that this step appears quite late in the 'writing process'.

The benefit of following a writing process approach is that when you start writing, you already have a good understanding of the ideas you are going to write about, the order you to are going to present them in, and how they support your overall argument. It is also an effective way to prevent writer’s block.

One way to start writing is to try expanding the bullet points in your plan into sentences and to link related sentences into paragraphs. You may also start writing in any section, based on the material you feel most ready to write about.

Don’t worry too much about the word count at this point; get ideas flowing on to the page.

It can be tempting to re-read and start editing your first draft as you write, but this can cost you time if you realise you need to do major revisions later in the editing process. Once you have a full draft, you are in a better position to shape your work into its final form.

Final tip

Use feedback you get on your assignment to reflect on your writing process and adjust it for next time. For example, if feedback suggests your argument lacked depth you may need to spend more time on the research and reading stage.