Yiruma - River Flows In You

Music while I'm writing.
Music is my inspiration and motivation. When I feel empty, sad or out of words, music always bring me up. It's like different kind of music gives me different kinds of ideas and input. When writing this blog-post right now I have my favorite pianist, Yiruma, in the background. When I'm writing papers for my class here at college, I usually need positive melodies and music that makes me happy.

Do music have an impact on your thinking or writing? If so, what kind of music do you listen to?

Make A Mind-Map

Do you feel empty or stuck before starting you paper? My little advice for you, if you want to have a little structure before you start writing, is to make a mind-map. This is probably the only advice about writing I feel comfortable about showing you, because I have experienced my self that it works. I learned how to use a mind-map on high school. What I do is writing down my main topic in the middle of a paper, then write down key-words around the topic with lines in between. This helps me getting a better overview and to see what my text will contain. It is much easier to start a paragraph if I can look at my mind-map and pick out what looks the best.

A concept which is much alike my mind-map is to make outlines. I started practising this concept when I came here. My classmates in English represented this expression for me, and the purpose is much like the purpose of the mind-map. When making outlines, all the ideas about the topics is charted down, except this setup is more like a step-by-step or paragraph to paragraph guideline.  

What is your routine before you start to write a paper? Have you tried making a mind-map before?

Picture from this page.

Recursivness

Have you heard about the word recursiveness? Rucursiveness was not a common word in my world. Having to understand the meaning of this word, I have also had the opportunity to use it in multiple contexts. Recursiveness, or retrospective structuring, is a structured way of looking back on what you have already written in order to go forward and discover more of what you have to say. In my previous project in my English class I looked at this expression as something that interrupted my writing. I explained it as a bad habit and how I self-judge my writing way to much. Turned out I was wrong. It can be good to look back on my writing, not to fall out, and to be able to look further on.

Sondra Perl, which I wrote about in a previous post, did a research on a guy named Tony. Turned out that recursiveness helped Tony in his writing as well. When he was aware of what he was writing, it was easier for him to look forward and to write more. So think about that, if you get stuck, or lose the grip of your text, try to look back and figure out what you were going to tell in the beginning.  

Are you recursive? Do you think that helps you to write a better paper?