Past Pre-writing Success

I have used a few different methods of pre-writing in the past, mostly in a class called Humanities/ In depth writing. It was a block (two period) class I took in Junior High with a teacher that was able to get us, her students, so very involved and interested in. We did pre-writing in web form, which our book; Writing Simplified (WS),also calls mapping, branching, or clustering. Often times we used this method as a group calling out ideas and putting them on the white board in a very visual way. Students would take that and apply it to their own topic, building a "web" of ideas on paper to work with. With almost every paper I did, no matter what form of brainstorming I used, I always ended up with details that were not used, or less significant details I could weed out of my drafts. Another thing I found very helpful was writing an outline using roman numerals, letters, and numbers to form a breakdown of each paragraph before I wrote them out. I definitely do agree that brainstorming and pre-writing give you a more successful outcome that reflects in your final paper. I plan to use some of these new ideas from our WS book to help me with upcoming assignments. The looping and stream of consciousness methods both seem appealing to me.