Fast text generation with mind map: “Mind map is a strategy for making notes on a topic, prior to writing. It is a structured strategy, which shows the (hierarchical) relationship of ideas, as opposed to an unstructured strategy, such as brainstorming, in which you produce notes at random on paper. Having an organized display of information from the outset of the writing process may help you, as it is more easily converted into a draft, whereas in brainstorming, the random recording of ideas might lead to problems with the structure of your texts”.
By Jane Smorodnikova
Mind maps can be used for a multitude of purposes. This article outlines how they can effectively be used to help support and develop your writing skills and makes text generation faster and easier.
Making a mind map should be a spontaneous pre-writing activity. You can start with a topic at the center and then generate a web of ideas from that, developing and relating these ideas as their mind makes associations.
Mind maps work well as their visual design enables people to see the relationship between ideas, and encourages them to group certain ideas together as they proceed.
As usually, article or any other piece of text begins from a topic definition or finding main idea of the text.
The mind map strategy can be used to explore almost any topic, though discursive essays and narrative work particularly well as they front ideas. But you should remember that there are only two ways to create an interesting text:
- explore an unusual or a new topic (writing news, innovation introductions and something else in this way);
- find some interesting facts about existing topic or describe in a new way.
Start by writing the topic in the center.
Creativity with mind maps
Once the topic has been introduced, you can try to close your eyes and think about it for a minute or two, in silence. And then just note down your ideas. If your topic is complicated, group your notes into branches, for example, divide arguments, advantages, facts or thoughts. Don’t forget to accompany your map with symbols, comments, images. Visual thinking is effective, when it is illustrative. To reach clearness and comfortable mind map creating – use special software, for example Mind Pad. For such activity as text generating software should support different types of frames, hot linking and writing text on links, like Mind Pad.
Then, working with your map, you can go over again your ideas, perhaps adding to your mind map as they go.
The map is fluid and changeable, and new connections or subgroups can be made, or branches added, as the you have any suggestions. The end result should be an organised display of information, showing the central topic, and a number of subtopics and further points that stem from it.
Another advantage of Mind Pad – is different frame types using feature. Use different frame types for end text, comments and so on. Use texts on links to define connections between suptopica and points. The best practice is to use quastions for it. For example, if the main theme is smoking, you can create such branches as harm, reasons and so on. In this case you can write on links such quastion as “Why is it so dangerous?”, “What are common reasons of smoking?”. Creating connections with quastions will help you to support logical structure of your text.
Writing a text from mind map
In the next stage you should organize your mind map into a linear format to decide the best way in which to present your points. You should first think about the overall structure, i.e. the order in which to relay the information, and then focus on the precise function each paragraph will have in their final text, as this helps to clarify your writing. If you use Mind Pad, you can just avail yourself of Mind Pad report function. Reporting allows transforming your map in a linear structure for further working, including all subtopics and comments.
However it is carried out, it is important to think about a context and audience. Having an audience in mind will helps you to decide which ideas are most important, and also helps to choose the appropriate style.
So, at this stage you should then begin to write your compositions.
Note, that at this moment because of mind mapping you already have:
- sensible topic;
- well-organized structure with headings, connected with the logical quastions;
- finished pieces of text in comment format;
- and the whole text structure with all this in one text file.
And now you just need to write additional sentences to describe you topic in details.
Mind mapping is a useful technique and often improves the clarity and organization of texts.