Thursday Thoughts: Old Hat

Happy Thursday from the Walden University Writing Center.  This week, our Thursday Thoughts post will focus on your writing habits and how your writing process is impacted by your creativity.

We have all heard that creativity is a muscle. You can stretch it and flex it to improve your creativity, just like bulking up at the gym. Since you use your creativity to brainstorm for, outline, and begin writing your papers, consider flexing your creativity before, during, and after the writing process. This will be your creativity workout. A writing assignment presents a problem that you can answer with creative problem solving. You do this every week with your discussion posts, and you can do it, too, with your longer assignments.

Flex your creativity for your next writing assignment.

When I am given a writing assignment, I tend to think about my writing process as a mathematical equation. My main topic is A. My subtopics are B., C., D., and my conclusion is E. If I correctly add up A through D, my paper will be successful, and E., my concluding paragraph, will wrap everything up neatly.

To flex my creativity as I approach a new assignment, I might ask myself new questions inspired by thinking critically about my topic. These questions might include:

• What information can I present to my readers that they will not have known before reading my paper? How can I captivate my readers while still maintaining academic tone?
• What ideas do I want to end my paper with? Is a standard "A. B. C. outline" the best way for me to get there? Is there a way I might outline my text differently to lead to this conclusion?
• What ideas do I want to discuss in depth in my paper? How will these areas of depth impact other areas of my text, and how can I balance this depth?

  



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