How To Plan Your Essay Top 20 Tips
How To Plan Your Essay
- How to Plan your Essay: Begin by Getting the Basics Right
- The first and fundamental step when approaching how to plan your essay is to correctly and carefully digest each of the requirements of the essay task.
- Know the Parameters of the Task
- The essay task may be quite specific and prescriptive, with deliberate and strict parameters. Alternatively, the essay task may be more open ended, leaving the writer to make the determination of matters such as length, level of language, style, number of sources, whether sources are to be contemporary or primary, broad or narrow, academic only or also more populist.
- Know the Key Terms
- Know the key terms in the essay question and what each one means.
- Be clear whether the question expects a certain position on the question to be taken, or whether the writer is free to choose their own viewpoint to develop and defend.
- How to Plan your Essay: Brainstorm Relevant Ideas
- After deconstructing an essay question to identify its component parts and key requirements, your essay planning will benefit from brainstorming ideas relevant to the topic.
- Once you have compiled an extensive number of ideas relating to the essay question and the topic it addresses, the ideas should be surveyed to prioritise their importance.
- Establish a Clear Thesis
- Once the more significant ideas are known, it will be possible to develop a clear thesis.
- When planning an essay, a clear thesis directly addresses the essay question, and provides a clear justification or rationale for why the thesis position is held.
- In other words, a clear essay thesis is a statement in response to the essay question that the essay will seek to explain and defend.
- Access to Good Resources
- Plan to have ready and easy access to quality resources, such as primary and secondary sources, including academically oriented books, peer-reviewed journals, as well as internet access.
- Use Appropriate Types of Evidence
- Evidence is used to back up a thesis and substantiate its claims.
- An essay may paraphrase pertinent sections of a secondary text or directly cite brief but highly relevant sections of a primary source. Anecdotes, statements by subject experts, comparisons between past and present subject opinions, are all legitimate types of evidence.
- Assemble Compelling Evidence
- A well-organised compilation of evidence is an essential part of how to plan an essay.
- When considering how to plan an essay, consideration must be given to accessing a wide range of relevant sources, from which relevant and illuminating citations may be drawn.
- This process enhances the discussion, debate or argument as it is constructed.
- Citing Authorities
- Evidence can take the form of citing experts such as those regarded as authorities in a given field. In this case, transcriptions of what has been said or written must be recorded accurately, to fairly and fully reflect the ideas of someone else within a new intellectual context.
- Organising Evidence
- When considering how to plan an essay, thought must be given to an organisational system for the collation of evidence, so that accurate transcription and appropriation of material can be maintained and preserved.
- Determine the three (3) best ideas to support your thesis
- When planning an essay, due thought should be given to prioritising the value of each idea identified through reading and note taking.
- The best ideas are ones that strengthen the thesis statement and make it plausible and compelling for the audience of the essay.
- Well constructed paragraphs are the basis of a well structured essay
- The beginning, middle and end of an essay function as the orientation, exposition and conclusion.
- Yet to plan your essay effectively, think about each paragraph as comprised of a thesis statement, an explanation, substantiation and a conclusion. This way the essay structure will give momentum, clarity and purpose to the essay’s development.
- In a well-planned essay with a series of well planned paragraphs; each paragraph may be a microcosm of the entire essay.
- Effective paragraphs contain effective topic sentences
- Essay planning should include time to construct intellectually strong topic sentences.
- These sentences, which normally comprise the opening sentence of each paragraph, are alternatively known as the theme of the paragraph. They determine the direction of the essay, and as such, must be considered carefully in the planning process and crafted thoughtfully.
- Usually, an effective topic sentence relates to the essay question in a specific and definite manner, as well as making an unambiguous and clear assertion that aids the thesis statement positioned in the opening paragraph.
- How to Plan Your Essay: Close Reading of a Text
- When an essay demands a response to a particular text, the matter of how to plan your essay is of vital importance.
- With a clear sense of the main requirements of the essay question in mind, the prescribed or chosen text should be read critically to extract its meaning.
- Reading texts is an activity that should be approached very actively when an essay response is required.
- ‘Interrogate’ the Text
- To read actively, it is best to ‘interrogate’ the text by highlighting its key passages, making annotations in the margins and ‘speaking back’ to the text, by writing questions and making written comments.
- For an essay to respond in a profound way to a text, the text’s purpose and techniques must be correctly identified and carefully evaluated. It is useful to determine how a text’s title relates to its contents.
- Time Management: Critical to How you Plan your Essay
- To plan your essay, the intellectual processes listed above are insignificant, if time is not managed effectively.
- Time must be shared appropriately to reading the task, reading to find the best source material, reading and analysing the source material, note taking, prioritising ideas, selecting evidence to support key ideas, drafting your essay and proofreading your essay.
- Since essay writing is a multi-step undertaking; the effectiveness of each step is affected by how well the previous step has been carried out.
- How to Plan your Essay: The Value of Editing
- When considering how to plan your essay, consider using another person or collection of individuals to peer review your drafted essay.
- This step provides a second layer of essay evaluation, providing the writer with further ways to enhance the clarity of the essay’s message and communication.
- Improvement in essay construction through the editing process occurs when sentence and paragraph construction, as well as use of vocabulary, punctuation and grammar are evaluated seeking ways to improve each of these features of your essay.
- Proofreading
- A final reading for mechanical errors allows punctuation omissions or irregular citations to be identified and corrected.
- An essay that complies with all requirements creates a stronger impression upon the reviewer and audience.
- Post Essay Evaluation
- Part of planning your essay is realising that the process of essay construction is a continuous loop.
- The self evaluation of each stage of the process should inform how you plan you essay on the next occasion, so that there is a deliberate move towards mastering essay writing skills.
- Post Essay Feedback
- The feedback received from the essay’s audience and reviewer should also refine how you plan your essay on the next occasion.
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