 You can use this strategy at almost any time during the writing process to help you brainstorm, organize, and refine your ideas. I'll be using online sticky notes to demonstrate, but it also works just as well with paper sticky notes on your desk. For this example, I have already chosen a topic and created an inquiry question to help guide my thinking. Now I'll be using the sticky notes to help me figure out what I want to say in my essay. First, write down your inquiry question on one of your sticky notes. My question is, how does socioeconomic status affect school performance? Now, write down everything you can think of that relates to your topic. You don't need to worry about filtering your ideas right now. Just write down everything you can think of. These could be big ideas from research you've done, concepts you learned about in class, or examples that you think are related. Here I've written down lots of examples from my research, and also Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, a concept I learned in class. You can always add more ideas later, so don't stress. Just think of what you can and move on to the next step which will help you focus your thinking. Now that we have some ideas to work with, we need to find patterns and put our ideas into groups. After thinking about it, I noticed that my ideas seem to fit into two categories. There are these ideas related to basic needs, and these ideas related to the resources parents can devote to their children. I'm going to group the related ideas together and rewrite them on different colored sticky notes so that it'll be easy to keep them organized. After you've found some connections between your sticky notes and rearranged them into groups, you can use those groups to create possible answers to your inquiry question. When I used the information in this group to try to answer my inquiry question, I came up with this answer. Students whose basic needs aren't being met don't have the luxury of worrying about school. And for the other group, I decided parents who work long hours aren't able to support their children after school. Now what I have here is almost an outline of the essay I'm going to write. Each answer I just came up with will be one section of my essay, and I have facts, examples, and concepts to back up those sections. One of the nicest things about sticky notes is that you can reorganize them as much as you need to, or come back and add information later when you've done more research. If you're using paper sticky notes, you can keep them safe inside a manila folder, and that will give you easy access to them later when you need them again. Also be sure to take a look at our other sticky note screencast, which explains how to use this strategy if you've already written a rough draft and want to start organizing your thinking from there.