| Objective
In this lesson, you will learn how to use visual methods of sorting information to develop ideas into opinions and examples for an essay.
Introduction
Road trip! Let's go! But wait-where are we going? How are we going to get there? What do we need to take with us? Where might we stop along the way? While it's sometimes fun to just hop in the car and go, if you're going any distance or for any length of time the chances are good that you're going to need to do some planning before you take off on your trip.
Like successful road trips, writing an essay takes a little planning also. Mapping and clustering are two visual methods of generating ideas for an essay or writing project. Both techniques can help people to generate ideas and to begin organizing those ideas. You can just grab your pen, and blank sheet of paper, and start writing.
Like on a road trip, you don't do a lot of planning first! In fact, for these kinds of brainstorming activities, you will be more successful if you don't even use a computer.
Creating a Mind Map
When you map an essay plan, you are creating a mind map that lets you look at the relationships between the things you already know but haven't quite connected together. You may not even know your exact paper topic when you start, but as you find connections, this will emerge. This is a great method for narratives, descriptions and compare/contrast kinds of writing assignments.
There are a few simple guidelines for mapping. First you always use a clean piece of paper and pencil or black pen. You don't want to confuse yourself with any extra ideas, and the colors come in later! Look at your assignment and then start your map by drawing a big circle on your paper. Let's go back to that road trip idea and turn it into a narrative that describes a perfect road trip. Ready? Let's go!
In your circle, you write down everything you would like to do on a road trip. Now is not the time to worry about how much it costs or whether or not your car will make the trip. You want to think of all the cool things you will do on the trip and just fill up the circle. Here is an example:
Once you have all those ideas in one spot, you can start working on connecting them together. Here is where those colors, and even drawing, come into your map. You might start with different colored circles or boxes, or just different shapes if you don't have colored markers, to find things that are similar. For this example, we chose two categories: things you do in the day and things you do in the night. We used blue boxes for daytime and orange boxes for nighttime activities. You will see there are a few new ideas that we had while we did this step, and even a few things that fit into both categories!
Now is the time to connect similar things together! Here is also where you start thinking about how your ideas might fit into groups that will turn into paragraphs for your paper. We decided that the things that went in both categories would probably be good in the introduction, so we connected those with light blue arrows. The next grouping was a little harder because things are not as clear. We used these ideas for the other groups:
A road trip stop at the beach (gray arrows)
A road trip stop in the city (pink arrows)
Night life in both places! (purple arrows)
Now, that looks messy! But actually it divides your paper into a paragraph outline:
Things connected by light blue arrows - Introduction
Things connected by gray arrows -- Things to do at the beach
Things connected by purple arrows -- Things to do in the city
Things connected by pink arrows -- Nightlife
There are a few things that aren't connected to anything! What do you do with those? Well, you can decide they don't really fit and throw them out, or you can use them in a summary paragraph at the end. For instance, you might want to wear comfortable clothes all the time, so you could say something like "No matter where I end up, it is important to be comfortable. Besides, I only want to take a backpack for my clothes."
Introduction
Here's an idea for you to practice your mapping skills. Imagine that your need to write a narrative about getting ready for your first day of college, and create a mind map. Remember, these steps:
| grab a blank sheet of paper and a pencil or black pen |
| draw a circle |
| begin writing your ideas all over it in capital letters |
| divide the ideas into categories using shapes |
| connect up ideas with similar categories with colored arrows or lines |
| create your paragraph outline |
That's it! You've conquered mind mapping. This technique will help you discover what you are going to write in a paper.
Using Clustering to Organize Your Thoughts
Clustering is a more focused version of mapping. Just as is true with mapping, when you are clustering, you are freely putting your ideas down on paper or even a chalkboard. When you cluster, you use words or phrases to identify an idea; then you can even use shapes and lines and even colors to group and connect those ideas, if you want to. Clustering is a good technique for any kind of paper, but it works especially well with arguments.
You start by writing your main idea in the center of a blank page. Let's use our road trip idea for an example again, okay? This time, you start out with your central idea and put it in a circle in the middle of your blank page. Then you think of big categories that represent things you might want to do on a road trip. Remember? We used day time, night time, city, and beach things. The difference is that this time we are going to write about what we would like to do, and make it an argument, instead of writing a narrative about what we already did, okay? Here is an example of our beginning cluster diagram:
Once you have this basic beginning, you can think about different things you might do when you are planning a road trip, and then connect them to your topic ideas. It is easier to see them if you connect the ideas with arrows to the topic ideas.
Remember we said we were going to create an argument? Well this is the place where you start putting that idea together. Let's argue that one of those "places to go" is the best choice for our road trip, okay? Looking at our cluster diagram we can see that Las Vegas and the beach are probably not good choices because we didn't think of enough persuasive information to make a good argument for going there. How do Chicago and Yellowstone compare? How could we figure out the best choice? Well, we can do that by rearranging this diagram just a bit. Here is one way to do that
Using pink (Chicago) and gray (Yellowstone) we connected the ideas from cost and activities to each place. We found that some of the ideas Yellowstone connected to were bad ideas, so we put an "X" on those lines. And, it turns out there are ten reasons to choose Chicago and only four to choose Yellowstone. Now we know it will be easiest to argue that a road trip to Chicago is a good choice for spring break!
So, how do we organize the paragraphs for this argument paper? Well, we look back at that diagram, and classify things that we thought of as important. One good arrangement would be:
Introduction -- Planning the trip and deciding on Chicago
Argumentative thesis -- Uses details from your diagram that don't really fit in the paragraphs. It might be something like "Given a student's budget, Chicago is a good choice for a road trip during Spring Break."
Paragraph 1 -- Driving and visiting friends you will stay with
Paragraph 2 -- Things to do in the daytime
Paragraph 3 -- Things to do at night
Conclusion -- Summarizes why Chicago is a good choice
Practicing a Cluster Diagram
Here is an idea for you to use to practice clustering: "Write an argument paper that discusses why your school should/should not raise the cost of a parking permit so that they can build more parking lots."
You can follow these steps:
| grab a blank sheet of paper and a pen or pencil |
| make a small circle in the middle of the paper and write "cost of parking" in it |
| create areas that you think will be important to your readers |
| extend those ideas by adding details that you connect to the main ideas with arrows |
| sort your ideas so that you can see which choice (raise/no raise) has more reasons and ideas to back up your argument |
| arrange your ideas into a simple outline |
There you have it! By using a cluster diagram, you have taken some vague ideas and turned them into concrete reasons and examples!
Summary of Mind Mapping and Cluster Diagrams
Mind maps are a little less structured than cluster diagrams, but both methods are quick ways to discover your opinion and organize your thoughts. In fact, they both work if you haven't quite gotten a handle on your topic yet because they help you see relationships between ideas you already have. For either approach, you start with a blank sheet of paper and jot your ideas down without much care for whether or not they are good ideas. Sorting out the bad ones comes later and shouldn't slow you down in this first process.
After you have your ideas, it is time to organize them using circles, boxes, and arrows. However, this is where the two methods really depart company. In a map your will look for relationships to use later in forming paragraphs, but in a cluster diagram, you will begin organizing your paragraphs right away. Some writers start with the basic circle diagram and then choose what to do with it once they decide how focused they already are on their topic. If things are a little vague, they go for the map. If a good ideal jumps right out at them, they choose the cluster diagram.
  
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