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Brainstorm

When you have a clear idea of what you need to include in your article you can start brainstorming ideas and vocabulary. Some people like to use spidergrams for this stage. A spidergram starts off with a word in the centre and branches out to include other words that interrelate between each other. A spidergram resembles a spider’s web – a web of ideas. Another way to brainstorm is to simply note down all of you ideas and then see how those ideas fit together into a logical order. Sometimes it’s a good idea to write each idea on a separate piece of paper so that you can move them around easily and see how concepts and vocabulary items link together.

Organise

Every piece of writing needs a beginning, a middle and an end – and that is the best way to divide up your initial ideas. When you have brainstormed ideas of what you want to include in your article – and useful language that you’d like to use, it’s time to organise them into some kind of logical order. Decide how you are going to divide the information. Some ideas will clearly belong in the introduction to your article. Others will go at the end. Everything else will form “the middle”. At this stage you need to decide how many paragraphs or sections your composition will have. There are no strict rules for this but in an article of 400 words it is probably a good idea to have an introductory paragraph , an ending paragraph and then two or three paragraphs in the middle.

Structure

While you are considering the structure of your article and deciding where one paragraph should end and the next one start, you should also be thinking of how you are going to link your ideas together. This is where linking words come in. Used correctly they will help you to achieve a more cohesive result. Linking words are words like but, meanwhile, whereas or they can be expressions such as to sum up, what is more or on the other hand.