If you’re still learning how to write an academic essay, it can be extremely challenging. There are a lot of skills involved and a lot of elements that you have to include to write a good essay. In this short guide, we’ll be looking at all of the steps that go into planning an essay. There are many more short books about essay writing on our website, www.writeyourthesis.com, so once you’ve planned your essay, head over there to learn about the next step in your essay writing process.
This short guide should take you less than 30 minutes to work through, and we’ll cover everything you need to know about planning an essay. We’ll look at how to understand all of the requirements of the topic or question, looking at instruction and content words in the topic. We’ll discuss how to generate ideas through brain- storming, mind-maps or free writing. We’ll cover refining those ideas in order to construct your essay’s thesis statement. And finally, we’ll talk about planning para- graphs so that you know exactly which ideas you’ll be looking at throughout your essay.
Once your essay is properly planned, it’ll be a lot easier and much quicker to write it. We suggest that if you are currently working on an essay, you go through each of the steps in this guide as you read through it, so that by the time you reach the end you will have your essay fully planned.
To start, let’s look at how to understand your essay question or topic.