Brainstorming. Working alone or wit

Brainstorming. Working alone or with others, generate as many ideas and questions as you can, without stopping to criticize or organize. Then, look for patterns and connections to help identify the main idea and the groups of supporting ideas. Journalistic approach. Introduced earlier in the chapter, the journalistic approach asks who, what, when, where, why, and how questions to distill major ideas from piles of unorganized information.Question-and-answer chain. Start with a key question, from the audience's perspective, and work back toward your message. In most cases, you'll find that each answer generates new questions, until you identify the information that needs to be in your message.