Experiment with strategies for exploring your subject and discovering your purpose. The following strategies will help you generate ideas.
Talking about your ideas can help you develop your thoughts and discover what your listeners find interesting, what they are curious about, and where they disagree with you. If you are writing an argument, you can try it out on listeners with other points of view to help you learn about counterarguments.
Reading is an important way to deepen your understanding of a topic, learn from the insights and research of others, and expand your perspective. Annotating (making notes on) a text encourages you to read actively—to highlight key concepts, to note possible contradictions in an argument, or to raise questions for further research and investigation.
Asking questions is a productive way to get started on a writing project. You might try asking Who? What? When? Where? Why? and How? to investigate your subject and discover important facts.
Brainstorming and freewriting are good ways to figure out what you know and what questions you have. Write quickly and freely, without pausing to think about word choice, to discover what questions are on your mind and what directions you might pursue.
A journal is a collection of informal or exploratory writing. You might pose questions, comment on an interesting idea from one of your classes, or keep a list of thoughts that occur to you while reading. You might imagine a conversation between yourself and your readers or stage a debate to understand opposing positions.
Although a blog is a type of journal, it is a public rather than a private writing space. In a blog, you can explore an idea for a paper by writing posts from different angles. Since most blogs allow commenting, you can start a conversation by inviting readers to give you feedback in the form of questions, counterarguments, or links to other sources on a topic.