Writing can be Easy, Effortless and Fun.

Mind Maps can be used to improve your writing at school, college, university and even at work.

I will cover creative writing in this article. I will cover business writing in another article.

Often the hardest part of writing is knowing what you want to write about. Finding your theme and how to begin can be the biggest stumbling block in the whole process.

Often an essay has to be written under severe time pressure. The worst kind of pressure is writing an essay under exam conditions.

Well, despair not! By using Mind Maps you can plan your whole essay in about Five Minutes. ‘Impossible!’ I hear you scream. ‘Trickery!’ and some ‘*!@%#$’ superlatives also come to mind.

If you have never created a Mind Map before, I suggest you read some of the other articles on this website, or do our Free, no obligation Mind Map course. Enrol Now and awaken your creative genius.

Pick a Topic

I suggest you pick a topic – any topic. Choose one now. If you cannot think of one, look around you. Choose any object that you can see.

I’ve chosen an onion.

Now draw a picture of your object in the centre of the page. Draw a few branches radiating out from this picture and write down Key Words of whatever you can think of about this object. Don’t worry about whether it makes sense at all. Just jot them down as fast as you can. Don’t spend more than two minutes on this.

When you Mind Map and allow your ideas and thoughts to flow freely, you’ll come to an ‘Aha’ moment where you suddenly know what you want to write.

Take out another page, or create a new Mind Map if you are using Mind Map Software.

Categorise your thoughts into clusters. This will differ for each subject. In the ‘onion’ example, you could have listed colour, shape, smell, uses, structure, biology…etc.

Under each of these categories, put down all the thoughts of your previous Mind Map into these categories. Add new thoughts as you go along.

Within Five Minutes you can have the whole structure of your essay mapped out.

I suggest you start with some tangible objects. I use my car as an example in our Free interactive Mind Map course, which can be found on classes.mindmaptutor.com. See the example below.

This process can also be much easier if you use Mind Map software. I suggest using XMind or FreeMind. Both are good Free Mind Map tools.

Using a Word Processor

If you are using a word processor like Microsoft Word, you could use this Mind Map to your advantage. If you put Microsoft Word into outline mode, you can type the structure of your essay from your Mind Map quite effortlessly. The branches and sub branches naturally define your different levels in Microsoft Word’s outline structure.

Now all is left is to type in the details describing and explaining the topics.

I hope this helps you to write effortlessly starts to put some fun into the writing process.

Example

Here is an example of a Mind Map of my car to give you an idea of how your Mind Map could look. This template is freely available in an interactive format, which can be used and adapted as you see fit using Free Mind Map Software, if you enroll for our Free Course.