Hi, and welcome to technique two in strategy eight habits, technique to states prepare in advance for a writing piece, prepare in advance for a writing piece. Once again, that's one of those that seems obvious. But a lot of times in practice, it doesn't necessarily happen if something comes out. And if it's spontaneous, and we have those, we've all had those wonderful, spontaneous artistic moments where we're inspired. And we get this idea and it just flows. And that's not what I'm talking about here.

If that happens, you should go with that. Go with that. But in terms of writing a piece formally, maybe you've already had that moment and then you need to go back and work on it and refine the piece into something that's more structured and more shaped and more refined. The explanation for that is to do research, gather information and outline ahead of time, especially when under deadlines. If you're a student, if You're a journalist, or if you're, you have a publisher that's expecting something from you. Or if you're a blogger and you have a weekly blog, it's important not to, I mean, it's important to make sure that you plan your work and work your plan.

And so prepare in advance as much as you can. And it saves you time later on. Example, um, before starting a piece, consider these elements. What is your purpose? That's one of the most important things in the rhetorical process. What is your purpose?

What are you writing? Why are you writing the piece? It's always important to kind of step back and look at it from a bird's eye view from above. Why are you writing the piece? What do you want to accomplish? Maybe you need to make some money or something, but there still needs to be or, you know, maybe your teacher told you to but there always needs to be a genuine reason.

And that's what I tell my students I say, I don't want you to just write this piece because I'm telling you to because it's for great If you engage genuinely in the piece and you find your own reason for why you're writing the piece is going to come through in your writing, you're going to do better and you're going to get a better grade probably. So those are all things to think about what is your purpose? Why are you writing the piece and the last one, what is the piece say that is significant about life, society or the human condition? That's pretty deep, but it's something to at least consider when you're writing a piece. And that will definitely help you to prepare in advance for your writing piece to set goals to do outlines, to give yourself deadlines and to stick with those deadlines and those goals as well.

And that is technique to in strategy eight habits. Hello, I wanted to add a little bit to the last technique and that was technique to in strategy eight habits. A couple of more examples in terms of helping you to think about preparing in advance for your piece. Another tool to clarify a writing piece is to use heuristics. And heuristics is just the simple who, what, when, where, why, how strategy. If you take those and put them on your computer screen or put them on a piece of paper, it helps you to brainstorm ideas that, you know you can clarify from different angles.

What is this piece about? Why am I writing it? Who is it for? And who is it about? Where is it taking place? Where do I want to focus my energy in my ideas?

Why am I writing this What? And it just it focuses all those things and helps you to think about it in other forms of free writing, which sort of connects to one of the previous techniques we just went over. You may want to look up these, they go into some more detail and I don't want to go into hardcore detail about them. But you might want to consider idea maps, clustering, cubing storyboarding and outlining. We did talk a little bit about outlining. But let me repeat those idea maps clustering, cubing storyboarding and outlining, and you may want to look at those on the presentation and look those up and practice some of those techniques.

There are other forms of brainstorming that will help you generate ideas, which is also important in preparing for a piece. And so consider studying and practicing those techniques and find out just like we were talking about in another technique, find out what works for you. And like I said, it may work one time and then you may try something else that works better another time. And so experiment with some of those brainstorming techniques. I think you'll find some that work very well for you and then some may not and that's okay.