Have you ever started writing an essay to find yourself running out of points or ideas for your paper? Is that what troubles you currently? We know how defeated one can feel to the extent of hating or fearing writing essays.
The surest way to address this common occurrence is to have a plan. If you ever find yourself in this situation, it is best to write an essay plan. Essay planning is a critical step in academic essay writing.
When effectively done, it speeds up the writing process, giving you a definite trajectory for your essay and ensuring you handle everything precisely. It helps you to achieve your essay writing goals and fends off writer's block.
When drafting and writing an essay, you can always amend your essay plan to reflect the contents of your essay. In many cases, your essay and the plan should go side-by-side.
Let us look at the best practices for essay planning so that you can ace that essay and not worry about any deadline.
An essay allows the writer to present reasoned, logical, and organized arguments responding to a specific question or topic. An effective essay structure is handy in clearly unfolding the arguments to the readers. Instead of leaping faster from research into writing, which is often the case with many students who fail their essays, consider how to present your essay's ideas. This is where an effective essay plan comes in. Let us look at the steps for essay planning.
In every assignment your teacher, professor, or TA assigns, they provide assessment details (RUBRIC) and assignment instructions. This is where everything starts.
A common mistake students make is jumping to research and writing without reading the instructions. Often, they end up writing essays that are irrelevant to the essay requirements and those that do not address the essay question.
If possible, print out the guidelines and meticulously go through each of its components to comprehend the scope of your essay. When printed, you can read and take notes. As you read, note down the following:
Every component is vital at this stage. When reading the prompt, outline, or guidelines, highlight the phrases in the essay question. This helps you to determine the direction you will take, which inspires confidence in your writing. You will know what to focus on with a successful understanding of the essay question. Therefore, you can narrow the scope of your research by only limiting yourself to specific scholarly resources that you can cite in your essay. You can break down the different parts of the essay question and figure out what each part means and its contribution to what you need to write about.
You also need to check if the marking criteria or rubric are provided. The essay you will write should meet the criteria set for top grades. It is your essay cheat sheet; it helps you know what components will improve your essay score.
This process should take you utmost 8-10 minutes to complete, depending on how long your instructions, guidelines, or rubric is.
Cyclist who knows they are expecting a climb will prepare their minds psychologically, and so does a good essay writer. With the knowledge about the scope and focus of your essay, you can find information to support ideas in your essay.
You can only achieve top marks and good grades for an essay with detailed, deep, and specific evidence. Therefore, you have to research widely. You need to focus on sources that resonate with the essay title. The best places to begin your research are assigned readings such as lecture slides, assigned books and articles, and class texts. After exhaustively reading the assigned materials, you can expand your research into scholarly and non-scholarly sources. The relevant non-scholarly sources should help you understand your topic further and create a context or point of view. On the other hand, scholarly sources help you advance the discussion in your essay; they are the ones you can cite when writing the essay.
While researching, keep track of the sources of your scholarly sources. Moreover, take notes by asking questions and challenging viewpoints as you engage with your reading. This stage helps you to have ideas of what to write. The notes you take have no limit and can look a little disorganized. That is what they should look like because they are, after all, initial notes. You need the next step to refine them further.
After gathering adequate information, you will realize that you are progressing positively. Although mumble jumbled, you can create a mind map to organize everything further. Having a mind map for an essay plan will help you map everything related to the essay question or topic. Most importantly, given the thesis statement, you must understand how many ideas you will have in your essay. Since the body paragraphs have around 150 to 200 words and the introduction and conclusion each account for 10-15% of the word count, you can plan how many ideas to have in your essay. Roughly, here is a short guide for how many main ideas you should include depending on how long your essay is.
Since you know your main points, organize them into a mind map. Ensure that every main idea has at least 2-3 scholarly sources with ideas that you can cite in your paragraphs. Ensure you give examples or statistics to explain every main idea. Finally, give your point of view on each key idea. You can use different mind-mapping tools available online.
As you brainstorm, ask yourself these questions to work out your initial thoughts and ideas about the essay question or topic (s):
You should write down everything and use lists or drawings to brainstorm further. At this stage, avoid discarding any idea relevant to the question.
Now that you have generated ideas, it is imperative to write the essay plan. With the initial research, it is possible that you now have a provisional answer to the essay question, which is technically your preliminary thesis statement. You also have the arguments for each of the body paragraphs.
Generally, an essay plan should follow the essay structure: introduction, body, and conclusion. Even though you might not be ready to create the introduction or conclusion for the essay, your plan should imply having a three-part structure of an essay.
In the plan, list your introduction, body section (respective body paragraphs), and concluding paragraph. Outline in simple sentences what you intend to include in the respective sections.
The introduction begins by listing the attention-getter or hook statement, followed by a few lines on the background information. Wind up the essay introduction plan by highlighting the thesis statement. A clear and well-written thesis statement determines the direction of your arguments and the general structure of your essay. It should comprise one or two complete sentences. It should also be a clear and direct answer to the essay question. The thesis should also be a claim that can be discussed and expanded further into the essay's body section and should be part of the introduction paragraph. You can paraphrase the essay question into a thesis so that it is clear, concise, and compelling.
Consider the thesis statement in your essay plan as provisional. You will notice that as you advance your research, you are highly likely to tweak the preliminary thesis. It also happens when reverse outlining the essay and making significant changes to an essay at later stages of writing. At this stage, you can use the statements line "this essay expands the idea that..." or "this essay argues that...."
Your essay plan should also include a body section where you detail the respective components of the body paragraphs. Since each paragraph has its own idea, list the main ideas that you will use to support the thesis. Under each idea, include the supporting facts. Make it very easy to trace the main ideas by formulating topic sentences.
The topic sentences are the first sentence of every paragraph that states the topic addressed in the paragraph.
When prioritizing or organizing the topics and subtopics, start and end with the most vital points. Additionally, arrange the ideas so that there is a good flow. You can plan to have transition words to ensure your reader cruises through your essay without obstacles. If you notice two ideas that fit next to one another, ensure they sit side-by-side. Besides, if ideas seem repetitive, merge them and ensure they strongly support your essay's thesis.
Finalize your plan by highlighting the components of your concluding paragraph. Majorly the concluding paragraph contains the reorganized or restated thesis statement, a summary of the main points, and a call to action or concluding statement. It should account for 10-15% of the word count. Outline these conclusion aspects, and you will have a complete essay plan.
You now have everything you will ever need to write a good essay. However, before writing your first draft, review your essay plan to ensure everything is okay.
The initial essay plan should not pressure you. Mainly, this is where you only rely on your creativity, critical thinking, reasoning, and analytical thinking. You should avoid perfection as it breeds writer's block in this stage, affecting many students.
It is best to convince yourself that this is the first step among several attempts to write a good essay. As long as every idea reflects in your draft, that is more like it!
The essay plan should help you create a detailed outline for your essay; you can choose to use different outline formats such as decimal, numeric, or alphanumeric outlines (go with what suits you the most).
When writing the draft, focus much on the body section of your draft, as you will always use it to perfect the introduction and conclusion of your essay.
Everything else about writing should be during the advanced stages of essay writing. An essay plan is part of the preparation stage. The writing and editing stages come later, just before submission.
Below is a sample plan for a 1200-word essay discussing how media can influence children using specific examples to support the arguments.
Source: The University of Newcastle, Australia
It was a good run reading this comprehensive guide, but writing an essay is more than just planning.
All the same, with a good essay plan, you are 60% done with the essay. It cuts down the writing time by three-quarters. Successful students always finish their essay plans early enough to allow them to write outlines and first drafts before half the deadline. With that done, you have too much time to write arguments that make sense, find the best scholarly sources, and address any arising matters.
If you want to write a standard essay for A-level, college, or university (level 6 writing), having an essay plan is non-negotiable. Everyone, including our best essay writers who begin with a plan, ends up with a stellar essay.
Briefly, you need to write an effective essay plan by:
Therefore, a standard essay plan should take 20 minutes to an hour, depending on your deadline and how well you know the process. If you are struggling, you can hire our top paper writers to write your essay plan and outline.
An essay plan must reflect the three-part structure: introduction, body, and conclusion. If you are writing a short essay, you will have 10% of the word count for the introduction, 80% for the body paragraphs, and another 10% for the conclusion. The short essay can have five paragraphs to give the reader adequate information when the word count is limited.
An essay plan helps organize ideas, which you can modify as you research further. It is a basic outline of your essay. An essay plan is beneficial when discussing your writing with a tutor, lecturer, or academic support staff. Planning your essay helps you to make concise, coherent, and correct arguments. It also gives you a logical structure and an endpoint for your arguments before you delve into writing. In essence, an essay plan and outline serve more or less the same purpose. However, some essay outlines are more detailed, precise, and organized than an essay plan.
The essay plan should be clear, concise, and coherent, like an outline. The length will depend on the word count for the essay you intend to write. Shorter essays have shorter essay plans, and vice versa. Unless otherwise instructed by your professor, tutor, or teacher, there is no limit to the words to put into an essay plan.
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