One of my favorite pre-writing techniques is called clustering, or webbing, and as
you can see here we've made a sample kind of web of word associations for
Martin Luther King Jr. Now I should point out that when you first start your
essay you may not be in a position to do this. You may have to do some research
first. You may have to do some thinking and reading and then you can sort of
put this together. And as a result, you don't have to see this web as something
that you just came up with on the spot, but it's something you can develop over
time, and you can add bits and pieces to it as you read more. So maybe just
keep a handy chart or a page besides you as you read and try to put different
topics on it and start to connect the dots.
What I've done here is I've actually split this into both conceptual topics
and then also more practical historical topics, and the two of course are sort of
interwoven. But maybe that's an easy way to organize the life of Martin Luther
King Jr. On the top left here we have racial equality as a kind of concept, and
then we have some other forms of equality that we might compare it to. So
often think about comparisons and contrasts. If you have a topic, what
would be related? What would be different? And just write these things down and
don't have any judgement yet about whether you're going to use this in your
essay or not. Then we have the civil rights movement historically and then
maybe even something more contemporary, like the Black Lives Matter movement
that has been going on more recently. Okay, so that's sort of one part of our
diagram. We also have political protests at the time that Martin Luther King Jr.
participated in. We have the bus boycott with Rosa Parks, we have the march on
Washington, where he gave his famous "I have a dream" speech,
and then we have this concept of non-violence. And maybe that's all you
want to focus your essay on. Maybe that's really the key. Just because we
have this big diagram doesn't mean that we have to talk about everything . It's
more a case of sorting out what matters to us. So we have non-violence and you
could think about something like his opposition to the Vietnam War.
That may not seem related at first because you know it's it's about war
it's not about the civil rights movement, but it is something that he was
interested in, and we can see a connection because he did not feel war
in general was justified either in this case. So just not just non-violence in
terms of protesting, but also in terms of war more generally. Then we have other
historical figures from the 20th century who are famous for their non-violence,
although Mandela is perhaps a more problematic figure in terms of his early
history and what he was involved with. And then we have a term like the "FBI,"
which sits here without an arrow and that can happen too in your diagram.
Maybe you're not sure what the FBI's involvement was. Were they nonviolent?
Were they violent? What were they doing at the time? Well, just put a question
mark behind it and you can do more research and find out. If we have
non-violence then we can also have violence of course, and we can think
about the Black Panther movement as an alternative kind of black protest and
then we have police violence, the Ku Klux Klan -- we have lots of different ways in
which we can expand on this topic as well. And then our last major topic is
that Martin Luther King jr. was a pastor, a Baptist pastor, and of course he would
have been inspired by the Bible. Now this is phase one. This is step one, where you
just sort of go through and create this cluster of ideas. But you can't stop
there, and the next thing -- and this is what really makes this approach
interesting -- the next thing that you need to do is you need to go through and
start comparing topics, start finding connections and contrasts. I'm going
to give you a few examples of how this might work. So let's just start for
instance with something like his opposition to the Vietnam War. Let's pick
a different color here... So we have his opposition to the Vietnam War.
What can we connect this with? We've obviously talked about non-violence, but
we could also connect it to something like the Bible. What does the Bible
say about war? And does the fact that he was a Baptist pastor -- does that influence
his opposition to the war? We can also connect it to other kind of ideas about
equality. And maybe he felt that the war would be unfair -- particularly to blacks
in the way they served in the military -- and maybe we can connect it to his
notions about equality, that this is not just racial equality he's fighting for,
but something broader, something broader for black people that they had to have ...
the same rights not just in being equal but in not being exposed to war in this
case. Or we could even expand it more broadly than that. We could say what
he's interested in is a kind of radical human equality ... in
which case war, if it's not justified, is definitely improper. So I don't know
where you're going to go with this exactly, but you can start to see that
we're making some connections here. Let's pick a different one [topic] again. We've talked
about ... these other forms of equality. What if we have a closer look at the "I
have a dream" speech. So we're going to read this speech and we're going to see
what forms of equality we might actually find in this speech. Is it just
about racial equality, or is he saying that there has to be much more -- that
black people can't be completely free unless they also have something like
economic equality, that we have to actually deal with some of these gaps
between the rich and the poor. Does he say anything about that, and if not in
this speech, maybe in a different speech. That might be another approach.
Let's let's look at a different one here again. Let's say that we are really
fascinated by the Black Lives Matter movement, and so we've been reading about
this and that's actually what brought us to Martin Luther King Jr., because we
have this question of how would he protest today? Is there any similarity
between the way people protest now and the way they protested then. And maybe we
could write an essay that deals with this topic, and then we can compare it
with things like how Gandhi dealt with violence, how the Black Panthers dealt
with violence, police violence then and now, and then also white
supremacist organizations (e.g., the KKK) ... do we still have any of these today and how
might they respond to the Black Lives Matter movement? As you can see we
can sort of cherry-pick topics that we think might be related to each other and
that we can bring together. So the point then -- what you want to take away from
this -- is that clustering is tremendously useful in getting first of all some
topics onto the page. But to really make it work for you, you
have to start reading the diagram in different directions, connect the dots,
and look for things that may have started on one side of your web
but somehow have interesting connections with other topics. And that's how you
create tension and some intrigue and that's how you write an essay that finds
things that are surprising to your reader that they may not have thought
about before.