Post-it note planning

Maybe you've heard of planning your essay with the clustering technique? That's when you jot down your ideas on paper in little circles and then you draw lines between the ideas that are connected. Well, you can also use Post-it notes to do that same thing, except that post-its allow you to organize your thoughts better. Get a block of post-its and jot down one idea per post-it. When you've exhausted your ideas (or run out of post-its!), then spread them out over a table surface and start looking for connections. Peal off those that are related thoughts and reposition them next to each other. Once your ideas are organized into related clusters, you can organize them even more by placing them in a line top to bottom or left to right according to what you think should come first, second, third and so on. After a while, you'll have whole lines of thoughts that will serve as the basis for your paragraphs; this line would make a great introduction, this one would be good as a body paragraph, this one should be the next body paragraph...and so on. You may even have the perfect conclusion too. What's neat about using post-its to plan a paper is that you don't have to think "in order" in order to end up with well-organized ideas.