There are many ways to explore your topic in the writing process: freewriting, listing, Venn Diagrams, cubing, and mapping. You can also review entries you keep in a writer's journal.

The following are carefully selected links that provide step-by-step guidance to help you in the process of exploring your topic, developing the ideas that you have come up with, and even brainstorming for your essay.

• The Ohio State University Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing has a useful page of techniques for Getting Started on a writing assignment.
• Purdue University's Online Writing Lab has a series of useful guidelines for preparing ideas and brainstorming for essays. Think of a topic for your paper and scroll down Purdue's Invention Page to come up with a fuller sense of the knowledge that you have about your topic and the knowledge that you need to acquire in order to begin the writing process.
• An excellent source for tips on Developing a Thesis has been developed by Maxine Rodburg at Harvard's Writing Center. The Writer's Handbook, an online writing aide developed by the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Writing Center, enables you to refine your ideas to come up with a more nuanced and complex thesis. If you scroll down the page titled "Developing a Thesis Statement," think about your topic and how you can answer the questions asked of you there. You may also want to review their discussion on the differences between Thesis and Purpose Statements.

Writer's Block

If Writer's Block is interfering with your writing process, try consulting a Brainstorming Page that "provides a nearly guaranteed solution to writer's block." The University of Richmond's Writing Center offers you sample topics and step-by-step directions for breaking through your writing impasse. Also, follow the links for Getting Started, including Freewriting, Clustering Ideas as Part of Pre-Writing, and Exploring Ideas through "Cubing."

Brainstorming in a Group

• For group research papers and writing projects, try a collaborative exploration of ideas. Visit Jeffrey Baumgartner's Step by Step Guide to Brainstorming, part of the JPB Creative Company, Ltd, for directions on how to explore ideas as part of a group and get your creativity flowing.
• Another site dedicated to leading your group through the brainstorming process and explaining the benefits of this practice is Mind Tools' "What is Brainstorming?" page authored by Edward de Bono.