Write the main topic of your project in the middle of a piece of paper. Draw a circle around it. For example, for a Sociology class, you may be writing a paper on "Representations of Race in the Media."
Draw lines coming off of the center. At the end of each, write something short that relates to the project. In the above example, you may want to focus your paper on different races, and you would write "Black," "Asian" and "Latino" at the end of the lines, but if you wanted to focus the paper on different types of media, you might write "Movies," "Television" and "Literature." Draw a circle around each of those ideas.
Expand your mind map. From each of your branches, you can draw more branches with ideas that relate to that specific idea, by giving examples of stereotypes of each race and specific movies or TV shows in which you can see them, for example.
Repeat step three until you've exhausted all of your ideas.