Writing an essay can be challenging when an individual meets a writing block. However, there are several writing techniques such as freewriting, responding to the text, brainstorming, or journaling that help to deal with this problem. This paper aims to utilize freewriting and responding to the text techniques to create a piece of writing that will serve as a basis for an academic essay.
I chose the article by Stefan Dege, “Why We Hate to Wait,” published in dw.com. In this article, the expectation is considered in a negative way – such as waiting in lines, and in a positive way, for example, when a child is waiting for Christmas. The author reflects why, for many people, waiting is so intolerable. He comes to an unexpected answer: as a rule, individuals believe that they are controlling time, but in the process of waiting, circumstances take power over them and their time.
Reading this article, I wondered if there were any ways to avoid waiting by accepting it as a phenomenon. Therefore, when I got to the paragraph about an African country where instead of “what time is it,” it is customary to ask, “what is the time ripe,” I was excited. The idea that expectation usually takes place in places that are “a bridge between time and space” also impressed me (Dege). For some reason, I was fascinated by this metaphor of timelessness, and I felt the desire to create some creative project related to this concept.
Here are the topics for an academic essay that come from my response. Firstly, it will be interesting to discuss projects of bright, colorful, and human-friendly waiting sites. Secondly, the benefits of prescribing specific times for admission and other timing practices in medical and administrative institutions can be studied. Finally, it would be interesting to analyze the texts of African writers, utilizing the concept of waiting and the concept of time.
Thus, freewriting and responding to the text writing techniques were used to find possible academic essay topics. To summarize, this exercise was interesting and useful for developing writing skills and overcoming the writing block. Besides, through the use of the mentioned techniques, three exciting topics for academic essays were found. This exercise has proven effective compared to conventional brainstorming when searching for essay topics.
Work Cited
Dege, Stefan. “Why We Hate to Wait.” Deutsche Welle, 2020, Web.