Writing your essay plan
Planning is an important stage in the writing of an essay. You can plan onscreen using a word processor or you can plan with a pen and paper by creating lists and mind maps. There are a number of software packages for English writing that offer to help you learn the skills required to write good essays. One of these skills will almost certainly be planning.
Step one when you are writing a plan is to analyse the question that your essay is addressing. You need to have a good understanding of what the essay is meant to be about and the points that you want to make. You may write a brilliant essay but if it fails to address the essential issue then all your hard work will have been to no avail.
The second step in writing your essay plan is to generate ideas. At this stage you want to simply record anything that you think is relevant to your essay.
The third step is to look back over all the ideas that you have generated. You now need to weed out any that you think are not relevant and maybe expand on others. Once you have got everything that you think you need arrange the points in the order that you want them to appear in your essay.
The fourth step is to organise your quotations, references and other evidence that you are going to use to support your argument. At all times you must ask yourself whether a particular quotation or piece of evidence is relevant to your argument. If it is not then it must be discarded.
The final step is to review what you have done so far and to make any necessary changes. You may find that you need to shift paragraphs around. You can then write your final essay and following this you will enter the editing and proofreading stage.
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