The Writing Process
Writing is a learned skill. Just like learning a sport, or any other skill, a person does not start writing and achieve a perfect draft on the first try. For a successful essay, a process needs to be followed. The process varies for different people, but generally it follows a similar pattern: planning, drafting, organizing, revising, & editing. Often these steps are repeated within the process. When students fail to follow these steps, writing is often disjointed and disorganized. I highly recommend following this process.
Prewriting
Prewriting is where you begin forming your ideas and deciding what you're going to write about. There are several techniques for this stage--including clustering, listing, or free writing. I tend to refer to this stage as "dumping" where you dump all of your thoughts and ideas on a page just to start the creative thought processes flowing. Different textbooks use different terms, such as "collecting" or "planning." No matter its name, the result is the same: this first step helps you start writing.
Prewriting has two real purposes:
1) To help writers generate ideas. When prewriting, you should not concern yourself with grammar, punctuation, or quality of ideas. You should simply write down all ideas that come into your head. Similarly, it does not matter which form of prewriting you choose to do. You can cluster, list, free write, etc. or prewrite with any combination of methods. Just don't skip this step...it tends to be the most useful.
2) The second purpose of prewriting is to arrive at and possibly organize a topic for your paper. Although this is called "prewriting," it can be circular and done at any time of the writing process.
* It is always clear when students skip the prewriting process because the essays they write are either unfocused or underdeveloped, so be certain to complete this process.