Once you have a lot of content to work with, the journey towards an essay becomes a bit like solving a jigsaw puzzle. How will you group and connect all the ideas together? Which ideas will fit into the picture and which ones need to be left out? What exactly is the overall big picture that you are building?
Keeping these questions in mind, we can work on organizing and grouping our ideas, while thinking about the connections between them.
Let’s go back and consider how we might organize the information from our sample mind map exercise.
Have a look at this more organized version of the ideas for the essay.
Start with the green boxes. We can identify three main ideas about how video games are used in the classroom and elaborate on the benefits of these uses.
The orange box tries to link these three main ideas to the question of why video games are useful and reflects on some conclusions about how video games allows students more active participation in learning.
The point about the negative impact of video games increasing screen time remains on the page. Should we include this, or cut it from the essay? That is a decision we must make.