8 Creative Ways to Brainstorm for an Essay That Stands Out

Has your professor assigned you a task to write an essay? And now you are staring at the blank page, not knowing what to write or where to start. We understand your problem brainstorming for an essay is a hard task, especially for a topic that is unfamiliar to you. 

Whether you are writing an essay for high school or college, you need to start somewhere. Brainstorming is an effective technique for figuring out where to start your writing. This technique involves collecting your ideas and prior knowledge about the topic. 

Brainstorming for an essay begins with a simple question: “What do you know about the topic?”. As you further dive down into this technique, you eventually end up getting quality ideas for your essay. If you are short of time and unable to brainstorm ideas, then you can purchase your essay online essay to earn good grades. Apart from this, this guide can help you in sharpening your brainstorming skills. 

How to Brainstorm for an Essay? 8 Creative Ways

Brainstorming is a technique that helps individuals to generate new ideas. Everyone utilises different approaches to gather ideas about the topic. Still, there are some of the most creative ways by which to brainstorm ideas for essays effectively. Let’s discuss what they are:

• Brainstorming involves gathering ideas and stimulating the writing process.
• Various brainstorming techniques are available, including mind mapping, SWOT analysis, free writing, starbursting, SCAMPER, and GAP analysis. 
• These techniques are greatly helpful in making your essay writing process seamless.

Mind mapping is the most common and effective technique of brainstorming for an essay. This approach is based on using the first idea and generating new ideas from it. Furthermore, you can better organise your ideas by using mind mapping. For effective mind mapping, follow the below steps:

• Write your essay topic on the centre of a blank piece of paper or whiteboard.
• Then, write a related term about this topic you need to know about. Figure out what you previously knew about these terms and what you further need to explore.
• Draw lines to connect tangible ideas. This mapping helps you to process your data.

Do you have too many ideas for your essay? Don’t know what to write. Don’t panic. The freewriting technique is the best solution to your problem. As the name shows – in this technique of brainstorm for an essay, you can write whatever comes into your mind. 

This technique is just about putting your thoughts on the paper, with no rules, and no revisions. The only limit of this approach is you have to brainstorm ideas for a specific time or write on a specific number of pages. Freewriting aims to stimulate your mind. 

If your teacher has given you an essay assignment in groups, then starbursting is the best approach for you, as this is a group brainstorming technique. It is used when you or your team members have pinpointed the same idea. To conduct starbursting, write this single idea in the middle of the paper and draw a six-point star. 

A different question is assigned for each point that can start with the following:

• Why
• When?
• Where?
• How?
• What?
• Who?

Take each question and identify how it relates to your topic. Suppose you ask, “When will you launch this product?” or “How did you develop this program?”. If you find this hard, you can get the services of a UK-based essay writing firm to make your writing process seamless. 

Word banking is like word association, but the key difference between these terms is that word association focuses on pairs of words, whereas word banking aims to form big words that represent a precise topic. You can understand word banking as a process of breaking down large tasks into small, manageable parts.

The key characteristics of this approach of brainstorm for an essay include:

• Natural and require less effort.
• You need to get answers to why, when, or how, etc.
• Helpful in filling your knowledge gaps.

This approach is one of the most effective brainstorming techniques for essay writing. It involves creating a table to evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats related to your essay topic. Further, this brainstorming approach helps you think about your essay topic more analytically and determine if there is a more effective way to address, interpret, and write your essay.

The advantages of this technique are mentioned below:

• Sharpens your problem-solving skills.
• Gives more comprehensive details about the topic.
• Highlights the competitive advantages and disadvantages of your main idea. 

SCAMPER is the most powerful approach to brainstorming for college essays that empowers students to think about their topic from different angles. Additionally, this technique helps them to improve and expand their essay’s main idea. 

For each letter of SCAMPER, ask yourself a question:

• Substitute: Consider what would happen if you swap A from B.
• Combine: Think what would happen if you combine A and B.
• Adapt: Consider how you can adapt your idea into a new context.
• Modify: Evaluate how you can modify your idea to make it more impactful.
• Put to another use: Think about how you can make your topic more meaningful by using any other way.
• Eliminate: Consider what you can remove from your topic to make it more simplified.
• Reverse effective: Think how you would recognise your topic.

Lighting decision jam (LDJ) is the simplest yet the most effective approach to brainstorm for an essay. This technique requires 40 to 60 minutes to complete and provides you with tangible results at the end. LDJ starts by highlighting all the positives and negatives about the topic.

Furthermore, this creative approach tells you what work has been done previously and what needs to be addressed about the topic immediately. In a nutshell, you just need to address your essay topic as the problem question and identify all the possible solutions to solve this problem.

If you are struggling to write down your essay ideas on paper, gap analysis is the perfect technique for you. This approach addresses the obstacles that hurdled your essay writing process. Generally, gap analysis involves writing a statement about where you are and then writing the aim of your piece of writing.

To execute this technique, you need a blank paper, write down all the relevant ideas that come to mind, make a mind map, and identify any gaps. If you don’t want to jump into this completed process, seek help with your essay from professionals who can assist you, from brainstorming ideas to crafting a winning essay. 

Brainstorming for an Essay Examples

Brainstorming is the most important step of essay writing. This step not only stimulates your writing process but also ensures that you take your writing document in the right direction. In the above section, we have shared some of the most effective brainstorming techniques that will certainly help you. But if you still need clarification, have a look at an example of how you can brainstorm for an essay.

Suppose,

Essay Topic: Importance of Marketing for Business Growth

• First, read the topic and understand what your professor expected to write on this topic.
• Then take a paper and write everything that comes to your mind. After writing all the ideas and prior knowledge about this topic, generate a mind map.
• Additionally, you can ask questions like what the business’s niche is, who its customers are, and what the goal of this marketing campaign is.
• You can use any of the brainstorming techniques mentioned earlier to pick out quality ideas from tons of concepts.

Essay Brainstorming Template

Brainstorming is a powerful tool that can help you in gathering meaningful ideas related to your topic. If your teacher gives you an essay writing assignment and you don’t know how to brainstorm ideas for your topic. You can use a brainstorming template to write your ideas. This template can make your brainstorming easy for you. 

Here, we have shared a brainstorming template that you can use for your essay. 

Conclusion

Brainstorming is a useful technique that helps in generating new ideas to write a piece of writing. If you are writing an essay then this technique is significantly helpful for your writing process. But before hopping on the writing process, you first explore different ways to brainstorm for an essay.

In this blog, we have shared the top 8 brainstorming techniques that will make your writing process effortless and help you craft a winning essay. These techniques include freewriting, mind mapping, SWOT analysis, word banking, SCAMPER, starbursting, and gap analysis. Moreover, these techniques not only help you score good grades but also make the writing process enjoyable for you.