Brainstorming for Ideas

Brainstorming is usually the first thing that we do to get ideas on our essay topic. Find a quite place and keep your mind open to any possible ideas during brainstorming. Feel free to ask your peers to give you feedback to stimulate our mind and start writing any ideas that comes to our mind without any particular organization on a paper or better yet as a ‘Mind Map’ with a simple general idea in the middle of it.

Then add branches to support the main idea. Just put down whatever that come across your mind, ignore the relevancy of the idea. At this stage if we are aiming as much ideas as possible. We will prune the ideas later.

Our mind map looks pretty good so far, but it could use more keywords and ideas, so let’s take a look at what we can find online. The internet is a gateway of information where we can get tons of good ideas if we know how and where to look.

Google Squared is a semantic search engine that tries to understand the user’s intention and the contextual meaning of the user’s search. What we like most about Google Squared is that, it shows the search result in a tabular form making it easier for us to scan for useful keywords for our mind map.

Each description cell gives us interesting fact from the main search term and gives us more information on that we can add to our list of ideas.

Adding keyword into the column refine the context of the search and bring relevant result to each of the topics in the table.

Pruning Ideas

We have filled our mind map with a lot of interesting topics and ideas. It is time to evaluate each ideas and pick those that are not only interesting, but most importantly, valid within the scholar community by validating each idea through Google Scholar.

Google Scholars combs credible scholars journals from various publishers and most of them requires a fee to access their journals. Unless you’re in a university that subscribes to these premium journals, you might be better off reading Google Books or visiting your nearest community library.

Writing an essay is an exciting and fun exercise to get an in-depth knowledge on getting to know fun facts about the topics around the assignment. There are plenty of online and offline resources that helps us to get ideas and write the essay from an interesting angle.

Google Squared, Google Books, and Google Scholar are just some of the available tools that we can use to assist us in our essay writing. There are other good tools out there and we should use the best tools that fits our skill and need.