Top 5 Ways To Plan Essay Writing That Work

Improving your essay writing skill requires time, patience, and practice. The more you write, the better you get. Getting help from your lecturer and peers and constructive feedback helps you get better sooner as you progress in your studies. This also increases your confidence as a writer. This is important because essay writing is an integral part of your university learning process. As you write your assignment, you get to learn and think and interpret the points you’ve gathered about the subject. Knowing how to present your point and show your understanding within your essay points to the marker that you’re knowledgeable in the subject area. However, you have to start by planning your essay to do any of this. 

Planning an essay is the process you take to sort out everything you’re going to include in your essay. An organized and well-planned essay proves that your ideas are in order and you can present them clearly and logically. So, a properly planned and well-structured essay ensures that the reader can easily follow all the points and understand each of them. There are several ways to plan your essay effectively, and some of them are discussed in this article. 

Breakdown the essay topic

Many students write essays that aren’t relevant to their topic because they didn’t break it down enough to understand it. Start by reading the question well and other guidelines or advice your lecturer may have provided on the assessment details page. Try to highlight the keywords or keyphrases in the essay topic. For instance, if you’re writing an essay on “the impact of artificial intelligence in the business world.” Your keywords are “artificial intelligence” and “business world.”

Breaking the essay topic down in this way is a strategy that college paper writers use to provide high-quality essays to meet the students’ needs. With this strategy, you can pinpoint what you’re expected to talk about in the essay and stay on track with it. These are the keywords that will frequently appear in the essay and help you search for sources for your essay. 

Gather up your essay sources and take notes

After streamlining your focus, the next step is to find the information to discuss. You’re not expected to write the essay from your head. If you want good grades, you need to provide some specific and detailed information. Fortunately, your lecturer provides you with resource materials that make life easy. These materials may be lecture slides or assigned reading. If you have discussed this topic in class, you should go through your lecture slides to find the information necessary for your essay. While assigned reading is other relevant resources that may provide useful information for your essay. 

Create a mind map to brainstorm

Your initial notes may appear too disorganized, especially when gathering information. The next step is to sort the information into ideas that make up your essay, and you can do this using the Mind Map technique. 

In this technique, you create a big vertical box where you write the essay topic, then create smaller boxes around it. The smaller boxed will contain ideas that may be worth discussing in the essay. Each idea may take between 200 and 350 words, so if you’re writing a 1000-word essay, that’s between 3-4 key ideas and 1500-word essays will have between 5 and 7 ideas. Once you’ve decided on an idea to include in the essay, write it in one of the smaller boxes around the middle one. Do this until you’ve filled all the boxes you created based on your essay length. 

Write a no-pressure first draft.

This is the start of essay writing. The first draft shouldn’t take you more than 3 hours, but it’s a no-pressure draft, so you can write as many as possible things that you can find or think of. Remember that you’re not under pressure. It’s only your first attempt, so you shouldn’t expect it to be perfect. At this stage, it’s more important that you write something down than what you write down. 

In this draft, you have a go at each key idea and turn topic sentences into full paragraphs. You don’t have to worry about your introduction or conclusion at this stage; they can come last. 

Edit and rewrite your draft every few days before the final submission

The first draft is where you write out everything you can find out about the topic. Subsequently, you try to streamline the content to fit properly into the topic. The other drafts can watch for grammar, typo and spelling errors, structural errors, etc. You may need to change many of the words used in the initial draft and try to add details from scholarly sources and other online resources to improve the essay quality. Each draft should be better than the previous one until it’s perfect enough for submission. 

Conclusion 

Essay planning is essential to the quality of an essay. Without putting a proper plan for your essay, you’ll struggle to write a fitting essay. That’s why you must learn some of the steps to planning an essay. 

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