Essay Plans: Perfect essay structure every time
If your teen doesn’t know where to start when they need to write an essay for school or for an exam then this article is for them. The place to start any essay is writing an Essay Plan.
Essay Plans are like a full cover insurance policy taken out against your essay. They ensure three very important things:
The essay follows proper essay structure, including each element of S.E.X.I.
The paragraphs follow in a logical sequence
Important points to make in the essay are not forgotten under time pressure
These three things are just as important as the actual content of an essay. Actually, they make the content of an essay much better because it’s easier to read. And because of these huge upsides Essay Plans save a tonne of stress.
So what actually is an Essay Plan?
You can think of an Essay Plan as the blueprint for an essay; it’s an outline of what each paragraph of the essay is going to be about. If you've read last week's article on essay structure, an Essay Plan is an outline of Overall essay structure AND Paragraph structure.
Like essay structure, Essay Plans are incredibly important, but thankfully also very simple! They might take your teen around 5 minutes to make (they’ll get faster the more practice essays they write), but boy do they save a LOT more time than that overall.
Let's take a look at an example.
This Essay Plan is recreated from a real essay that I wrote in high school (we studied The Matrix in English class, and no actually it didn’t make me hate it, quite the opposite!).
The first thing I wrote down is that there will be an introduction followed by three paragraphs (each one dedicated to a single main point) and finally a conclusion. The next step was jotting down the S.E.X.I. for each paragraph e.
Now the essay practically writes itself
Students often lose marks in their essays due to a lack structure and therefore clarity. In the high pressure environment of an exam it’s even harder to write a brilliant essay off the top of your head.
The brilliance of an Essay Plan is that it tells you what to write and in what order, so all you’re doing when you write the essay is 'filling out' the Essay Plan.
Don’t overthink it
Essay Plans don’t need to be beautiful. The example above demonstrates a very thorough Essay Plan. That level of completeness is probably not realistic in an exam situation. The important takeaway is that you don’t write a wonderful essay off the top of your head. It takes planning. And a simple plan can transform the process of writing an essay from a dog’s breakfast to a structured and coherent piece of writing worthy of a good grade.
Photo credit: Eduction photo created by freepik - www.freepik.com
