Homeschoolers Need To Practice Writing More Essays     How else can you practice the essay writing experience? (Continued) Brainstorming Process Even if you have an excellent idea of what you want to write about, you should get used to the idea of brainstorming your subject. There are a variety of methods out there that you can choose from, so how you do it does not matter as much as whether you do it. The basic idea behind brainstorming is that you want to generate a variety of new ideas or thoughts regarding a certain problem or subject. Brainstorming is a good habit to get into because there will be times when you will have to write a paper about something, and you will have no idea of what you are going to say in the paper. It is at that point when you will be thankful for experience in brainstorming. This will be especially useful for in-class essays, when you will need to come up with a thesis and write your essay relatively quickly. Write in Drafts Especially in early English courses, your teachers may request to see rough drafts or outlines so that they know you are working on a project. I never wrote outlines, and my rough drafts usually ended up being essentially identical to the final draft. So it might not be a bad idea to write an outline when you are first brainstorming your idea and then work with multiple drafts. Again, most basic English courses will elaborate on this further, but you can get a step ahead by working on these things now. Grammar check your paper (do it for yourself!) While being homeschooled, if you simply write an essay and hand it to the person who will be grading it and have them check it over for you, you will not be preparing yourself for college life. Now what you could do is get general comments from the one who will be grading you, but do not have them spell check, proofread, edit or do anything other than general information. You need to learn to do this part for yourself, as you won’t always have someone to hold your hand through the proofreading, spell checking and editing process. Now is a good time to learn to do this for yourself, and it will serve you for the rest of your life, not just in college. So not only will looking for your own mistakes help you in college, but it will help you in the real world. As you might already know, one of the best ways to check your paper is to read it aloud to yourself. Brainstorming Process Even if you have an excellent idea of what you want to write about, you should get used to the idea of brainstorming your subject. There are a variety of methods out there that you can choose from, so how you do it does not matter as much as whether you do it. The basic idea behind brainstorming is that you want to generate a variety of new ideas or thoughts regarding a certain problem or subject. Brainstorming is a good habit to get into because there will be times when you will have to write a paper about something, and you will have no idea of what you are going to say in the paper. It is at that point when you will be thankful for experience in brainstorming. This will be especially useful for in-class essays, when you will need to come up with a thesis and write your essay relatively quickly. Write in Drafts Especially in early English courses, your teachers may request to see rough drafts or outlines so that they know you are working on a project. I never wrote outlines, and my rough drafts usually ended up being essentially identical to the final draft. So it might not be a bad idea to write an outline when you are first brainstorming your idea and then work with multiple drafts. Again, most basic English courses will elaborate on this further, but you can get a step ahead by working on these things now. Grammar check your paper (do it for yourself!) While being homeschooled, if you simply write an essay and hand it to the person who will be grading it and have them check it over for you, you will not be preparing yourself for college life. Now what you could do is get general comments from the one who will be grading you, but do not have them spell check, proofread, edit or do anything other than general information. You need to learn to do this part for yourself, as you won’t always have someone to hold your hand through the proofreading, spell checking and editing process. Now is a good time to learn to do this for yourself, and it will serve you for the rest of your life, not just in college. So not only will looking for your own mistakes help you in college, but it will help you in the real world. As you might already know, one of the best ways to check your paper is to read it aloud to yourself.