Prime Time 8. Coursebook plus Semester Self-checks, Schulbuch

Special skills Collecting and structuring ideas Before you start writing your text you should collect all your ideas and work out an appropriate structure. Two methods have proven useful: brainstorming and mindmapping. Brainstorming Brainstorming is all about collecting ideas spontaneously that you can use for texts, projects, etc. In an exam situation you will need to brainstorm individually, but actually brainstorming is a popular method for groups to collect their ideas. All you need is a plain sheet of paper and something to write. Before you start to brainstorm a particular topic, it is a good idea to warm up by using thought associations to make a simple word chain. Start with the topic given (e.g. doping), write down the first word that comes to your mind, then another word which is prompted by the word you have just written, and so on. Don’t stop to think between words. This method reveals to you the way you associate, i.e. the way you think and connect ideas. With these associations in mind, you may then move on to brainstorm the topic without being restricted to a word chain. You can group your ideas and associations freely around keywords on the sheet of paper. You can also interconnect them in any way that makes sense to you and helps you generate more ideas. When you have finished mark the words that go together with the same colour. Mindmapping Mindmapping can be used to generate ideas, but it is used much more often to visualise, structure and classify ideas. It enables you to group the thoughts you have collected through brainstorming into meaningful units that help you develop a structure for your text. In that respect, mindmapping is different from freely associating ideas in brainstorming. Much more thought and planning must be used to create a mind map than to brain- storm thoughts. Take a large piece of paper, write the topic heading in the centre of the page and draw a circle round it. Draw lines from this circle to subheadings of the topic, then more lines from the subheadings to additional or sup- porting ideas. The lines reflect a certain hierarchy: Central lines are thicker; lines with secondary thoughts are much thinner. When you have used all your ideas, study your mind map and find out how it might be improved. Can you create additional links between ideas belonging to different parts of the mind map? Tip • • It takes much more time to revise a carelessly written text than to spend some time collecting and structuring ideas beforehand. T 1 Tip • • Concentrate on quantity, not quality. • • Try to include some unusual ideas, too. • • Don’t judge any of the ideas while brainstorming. • • Use ideas already there to generate new ones (association). • • Don’t focus too much on organisation or layout. T 2 Tip • • Don’t try to create a particular kind of structure (e.g. symmetrical) for your mind map. Just let it evolve in response to the ideas you add. • • Use images, symbols and codes and link your ideas in as many ways as possible. • • Use multiple colours for visual stimulation and also to encode or group. • • Use emphasis and show associations in your mind map. T 173 Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv