What is the essay planning process?

It’s important to deconstruct the essay question in this way and to question each of its parts before you begin researching. It would be quite unfortunate to waste time in the planning or writing stage because you later realised you’d misunderstood the essay question.

2. Ask Questions

Before you begin reading and researching, you should probably have some questions in mind to better guide your investigations, such as ‘What kind of technology?’ or ‘How expensive might such technology be?’. At this early stage, such questions will likely only be vague or broad, but they will perhaps still help to guide you in assessing the first sources you read for whether or not they are generally relevant or useful. If, for example, you’re researching about language teachers in secondary schools and you find information in a source about geography teachers at university, then you should quickly know that this information is not related to the essay question.

3. Find Appropriate Sources

Now that you’re ready to begin researching, you’ll need to find appropriate sources to use as evidence or examples in your essay. If you’ve been provided with a reading list, use it. The reference lists provided in the sources on the reading list may point you towards other useful articles. Additionally, you may find sources either through an internet or library search by using key search terms and Boolean operators. And don’t forget to return to stages one and two of the planning process to double check the essay question and make sure that you’ve prepared the right questions to ask of your sources.

4. Read and Take Notes

While you’re researching (and you should do a lot of reading for each essay that you write), it’s important that you take clear, consistent and accurate notes as you’ll need these to confidently write your essay later. One recommendation is to create a word document for each new source that you read and then to include in that document any important details such as the referencing information of that source, any useful quotations and page numbers, and any notes that you’ve made about the content contained within. You may also need to return to stage two of the planning process so that you can reformulate your questions or ask new ones for any ideas or arguments that your reading has created.

5. Group the Evidence

The final stage in the planning process is to group your evidence and ideas. Once you feel you have read sufficiently and made sufficient notes, a good idea would then be to thematically group the information that you’ve collected so that it can be better incorporated into an essay plan. Which information might be useful as background to an introduction for example, and which might be useful as supporting details in body paragraphs? Additionally, don’t forget to consider how the evidence is connected, which evidence might go in the same paragraph, and which evidence is for or against your topic or concept.

The example below shows how evidence might be thematically grouped, therefore becoming useful for distinct body paragraphs: