Clustering
Matt has a general idea of what he wants to talk about for his persuasive speech for his Public Speaking class. He wants to persuade his audience to support an initiative to make their campus a smoke-free campus. In selecting this topic, Matt has carefully considered the purpose, which is to persuade, and his audience, which is a group of approximately 25 college students whose ages range from 17 to 35. He knows that at least two of his classmates smoke, so he assumes that they will be the toughest to convince. Now that he’s selected his topic, he needs to expand it so that he has enough content to fill the time requirements for the speech, and he needs to organize it in a way that will make sense to him and to his audience. Since Matt is a visual learner who thinks in pictures, he has decided to start off with the clustering technique.
Clustering, also called mapping or webbing, is a great prewriting technique for visual learners, because it allows them to literally see the connections between their ideas. In the example above, Matt used a free online software called MindMeister, but you could also use a simple sheet of paper as well. To begin, Matt wrote his topic idea in the center of the page and drew a circle around it. Then, Matt began to think of associated ideas like the benefits of his claims, and drew connecting lines between those ideas and his central topic. Matt continued on with other categories like problems, action points, and attention-grabbing ideas for his speech. Feel free to be as creative as you like in your own cluster or mind web. There are no rules! Do whatever works for you!