When writing an essay, such as the ones that we've been writing for our Writing 140 class, it would be best to do a lot of prewriting in order to organize thoughts better. Since essays tend to pull from a lot of background information and material, sometimes its hard to see the argument at first or come up with a thesis. In order to get my thoughts straight, it definitely helps to do a lot of random brainstorming and freewriting, then turning to a more structured approach to prewriting such as a TOPOI or Fact/Idea list. From there, then it's okay to construct an argument outline, followed by a rough plan for your paper as well as a thesis. After performing all of this organized prewriting as well as a more free-thought prewriting, tackling the actual writing part of the essay comes much more easily to the writer. I found this to be the case for my Assignment 2. I did about three times as much prewriting for Assignment 2 as Assignment 1, and I had twice as much of an easier time writing that essay as my first essay. I probably only spent a total of three hours writing five pages, which I consider to be a really effective use of time in my standards.
Planning thoughts for a speech would be a lot more different from an essay. While in an essay you have the time to sophisticatedly form your argument and develop the complexity of what you're trying to say, in a speech, the most important thing is that you get your point across immediately to your audience and also are able to support your point with clear, specific, accurate facts. Similarly to writing a paper, for a speech you would also need to do research, but it would be more important to find very to the point, eye-opening facts that grab the attention of the audience. After all, there is nothing worse than boring your audience with mundane information that is not out of the ordinary. Your speech, similarly to your paper, should also have extremely sound logic - the audience will be able to tell if you are flubbing or don't have adequate information, probably even more so than if you were writing an essay. In an essay, I feel that it's easier to make your logical fallacies transparent or mask them with fancy language. In a speech, however, it is MUCH easier to tell if you don't know what you are talking about. Prewriting and organizing your ideas into clearly structured arguments is a great way to plan out your thoughts.
In the end, writing an essay and writing a speech aren't all that different from each other. In both cases, I would approach planning my thoughts very seriously and allot significant time for research, brainstorming, thinking, considering pros and cons of certain viewpoints - anything to strengthen and perfect my argument. However, what's very different about writing an essay and giving speech is obviously the way they are presented. The strength of a paper is being able to formulate your argument in a more complex and structured way, while in a speech, the specific words you choose and facts you choose to present should be strong, forceful, and persuasive : being to the point is very essential in grabbing and convincing your audience. A speech's rebuttal would need to be particularly strong, especially in a debate - for in a debate you would need to prepare multiple strong rebuttals in order to make your opponent seem weaker and strengthen your own side of the argument. Rebuttals can also definitely help to strengthen an essay, but you probably would not need as many compared to a speech or debate.
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