Begin organizing your research and ideas into an answer.
Essay plans II
After you’ve researched and your ideas are more developed, write a second essay plan. It will help you work out how to answer the question and how the essay will be structured.
- Decide on a possible answer to the question (in terms of the research you have done)
- Decide on the information you will use to answer the question
- Look through your notes and choose examples to provide evidence to support your answer
- Decide which points you will discuss, and in which order
- Write all this down in point form and this will be your essay plan
Thinking it through
Essay writing requires both creative and critical thinking.
- Creative thinking encourages you to broaden your ideas. Try techniques like brainstorming or mind mapping.
- Critical thinking encourages you to narrow the focus or scope of your ideas (for example, asking why an example is important to your argument).
Your essay should be balanced: that is, it should include a range of information and viewpoints from different authors that explore the key arguments and relevant aspects of a particular topic. Don’t only include evidence that agrees with what you are arguing; if there are different or opposing views, then they need to be examined.
You need to evaluate differing arguments – explain why one argument is more convincing than another and how they relate to the conclusion your essay arrives at.