I honestly do not know what to blog about this week. I just blogged about The Road in last week's blog, so repeating a topic is not good. Also, my next week's blog will be about The Count of Monte Cristo as a whole, so I will not be able to write about it this week. So, this week, for the first time, I will actually be using one of Mr. Mullin's blog suggestions.
I have never been a fan of prewriting. It seemed to me like a waste of valuable time which could be used to work on the actual piece that will be graded. For that reason, I used a similar tactic as the one described in the posted article, which is to write the actual piece, then go back and create the outline. This guaranteed exact matching of the content, and it was also easy/efficient. I practiced this method basically from 4th grade all the way up to this year.
Just like all the rest of us, I wrote essays in such intervals that I have never written before. I had to produce quality writing while I also had to do it at a decent pace.
With my writing style, I jumped straight into writing the responses for the various prompts that the colleges give us. Even though I manged to squeeze out an essay at the end, I did not like it at all or it went on a tangent of the prompt so it was useless. So, this resulted me in scrapping the idea and actually brainstorming ideas before getting to work on the writing. I was actually OUTLINING before I started work on the essay. This allowed me to get my thoughts together, and I was able to produce essays that I thought were some of my best writings.
While outlining did help me, I want to make a disclaimer. I believe that detailed outlines restrict the writing, and prevents it from improvement. The type of outlining that I like is just a list of phrases and ideas that I will use in the paper. This will allow me to combine/formulate the ideas and phrases in whatever order and method I see best fit, allowing me to create the best writing possible.
So, in conclusion, I do believe prewriting helps, but for me, only as a list of phrases and ideas that will be used in the writing.
I like just putting my ideas on a paper so I won't forget any I think of that might work. I think a requirement of a detailed outline is silly, because the purpose of an outline is to set-up the paper, not write it.
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