MORE ON STUDY MAPPING.

Working on an Essay Mapping is a particularly powerful tool to use during the early stages of writing an essay, before you write the first rough draft. When you start out exploring material that may be useful for your essay, you can summarize your readings -- using Mapping, as described above -- to help discover fruitful areas of research. Finding a suitable thesis is a process of exploration and approximation, and later on, insight. You may want to look for something that you find interesting and somehow problematical, with implications beyond itself that you can explore. It is often difficult to find a powerful thesis for an essay; hence, there is an inevitable, often unpleasant, and occasionally lengthy, period of confusion. During this period, to progress toward a resolution, it is necessary to know where you stand: - what you know; - what your specific questions are; - what your own opinions or interpretations of the material are; - whether own opinions are applicable or should be questioned. Remember, try not to refer to notes or other source material when you are doing your Map. Ask questions such as those listed above (#7, "Summarizing Notes"). Organizing the material is another common problem that people have when they are writing essays. Mapping will allow you to see the major categories of your essay, but will not impose an order on them. This will allow you to place your ideas in a sequence most applicable to your purposes. Aside from summarizing readings, always feel free to use Mapping to help you think, when you are working on an essay. Use this technique as often as you like, particularly when you are stuck, and as you become familiar with it, you will find it more and more useful and flexible. An additional incentive: Tony Buzan notes that "Using these techniques at Oxford University, students were able to complete essays in one third of the previous time, while receiving higher marks." (Use Your Head, p.102). When you are mapping for an essay, emphasize arguments, explanations, definitions, and abstract categories and relationships. An example of this sort of Map occurs in the essay entitled "Essay Writing as Play," (Ed. B-425: Anthropology and Education), in the Student Essay Library, at Counselling Services. Creative Writing While you are working on an essay, you may experience a particularly important insight as you are Mapping: of course, you cannot predict what this "creative spark" will be about or when it will occur--however, if you are serious about writing orthinking, you should become familiar with the process that precedes insight. One very effective way to do this is to use Mapping for creative writing. An excellent book on the use of this technique for such literary (and even "therapeutic") purposes isWriting the Natural Way, by Gabriele Lusser Rico, who refers to her version of Mapping as "Clustering." Reading List *.Buzan, Tony.Use Your Head. *.Rico, Gabriele Lusser.Writing the Natural Way. *.Counselling Services Handout. "How to Read University Texts." If you would like to practice doing a concept map, and then compare your work with an example on the next release....