Academic writing comes with several processes. After the first essential step, which is to understand the title, the next procedure is to generate as many ideas as you can. It is often called "brainstorming", one of the best ways to prepare your mind before the actual writing task. There are three common techniques in brainstorming,
namely clustering, listing, and freewriting.

Definition of Brainstorming

Brainstorming is a method that is used to collect as many ideas as you can, as well as to extract the appropriate arguments as quickly as you can. Here "Many and Quickly" are important. A frequent mistake one makes is to stop brainstorming after writing down only a few ideas, which can be considered "Not Storming", since it is a way of mind training, which should have much energy and power, leading to a flood of ideas. Brainstorming may take a long time to adapt, it is definitely beneficial in the long run.

Three techniques in brainstorming

• Mind-mapping
  
  Mind-mapping is a visual brainstorming technique, also called "Clustering", which is routinely used by many people for capturing ideas. It is especially useful for visual learners with its well-organized form.

• Listing
  
  Listing, as its name suggests, is a brainstorming method in which you make a list of planning ideas. It is advantageous, which it allows those ideas to be generated in a more robust and quicker manner, as the ideas can be written in any order.

• Freewriting
  

Freewriting is an activity in which it allows the writer to exercise writing skills about any topic. The advantage of this technique is that it might enable one to generate ideas when other methods all fail. It is usually not a good option, especially for students since it takes more longer time and the writing content tends to be disorganized and will need to be discarded at the end. It is more beneficial when writing creative works such as stories.