Brainstorming English Papers and Building Self Confidence

Learning how to analyze passages and compose essays can be very challenging for a lot of students. They often have terrific ideas but find it difficult to get those ideas onto paper and translate them into coherent sentences and paragraphs. This can lead to frustration and a dependency on AI sources for ideas and, sometimes, the entire essay. Nowadays, kids have access to several programs (ChatGPT) which can literally compose complete essays, without requiring them to do any brainstorming or prewriting work. This approach does not provide any benefit to the student and can actually be harmful in the long run. Rather than building their writing and analytical skills, students only learn how to copy and paraphrase the text and deny themselves the opportunity to learn how to write with their own abilities, which will become very useful later on in life.

A very good way to brainstorm ideas is creating a mindmap or bubble map. Essentially, the student scribbles potential topics on a piece of paper and then connects all of the words and thoughts they can think of to each of these topics. At the end of the exercise, there will be an interconnected web of ideas around different ideas and he can decide which would make the best essay. It also helps to construct an outline before actually beginning the writing process. The outline allows us to create a map for our essay, helping us to stay on the subject and not wander into many different directions. The outlines can be very basic, like a skeleton, or can be more detailed.

It is very important that students learn to generate their own ideas at an early age. We want to help them develop self confidence in their abilities and not have to rely on artificial intelligence sources to do the work for them.