Now that you know what the question or topic is asking of you, you can start to generate ideas of what you would like to include in your final essay. The important thing to remember about generating ideas is that the ideas don’t have to be perfect just yet. In fact, they can be a bit out of the box right now. Give yourself some freedom to be creative with your ideas. You will have to cut out some of them later, so it’s better to have too many ideas than too few.
The first thing to do is to look at all of the instruction and content words you’ve highlighted and to form a basic mind-map of the structure your essay will follow. This will help you to generate ideas for each paragraph and for your thesis statement. This structure might change later, but it’s useful to keep it in mind at the start.
I’ve given a new topic below, with the instruction and content words pointed out in the same way we did before.
Discuss the implications of Brexit, looking at how it will affect the British economy and how it will affect the relationships between nations within the United Kingdom. Based on current political trends, explain the effect on the European Union if another country decided to rescind its membership.
Again, the topic is very complex, and you’ll need to cover a lot of ground. Let’s list all of the points you have to cover:
Implications of Brexit
Effect on the British Economy
Effect on relationships between nations in UK
If another country rescinds membership
Link to current political trends
Effect on the EU
So these are the four basic points you are being asked to write about, under two broad headings. You can see that these different points would very easily make good paragraphs in your essay if you kept the structure the same. Once we have the main points we need to cover, we can structure our paragraphs in a mind-map:
Paragraph 1: Introduction
Paragraph 2: Explain Brexit
Paragraph 3: Effect on British Economy
Paragraph 4: Effect on Nations in UK
Paragraph 5: Explain how nation could rescind membership
Paragraph 6: Explain Current Political Trends
Paragraph 7: Explain effect on European Union
Paragraph 8: Conclusion
You’ll notice that this basic essay outline has been completely lifted from the topic given above, except for two paragraphs, paragraph 2 and paragraph 5, which I felt were necessary to explain some basic facts that the reader might not know so that they can understand the rest of my points.
This might seem like a lot of progress to make in a short time, but you’re not done planning your essay yet. Even though you know what you’ll write about and the basic structure of your ideas, you don’t know what you’ll say or how you’ll say it. You know which paragraphs the question is asking you to write, but you don’t know what the content of those paragraphs will be.
The next step is to try and brainstorm some ideas that you could use in your essay. You could think of topics or points that might relate to the question you were asked, and list as many of them as you can. Give yourself ten minutes on a stopwatch and spend the entire time brainstorming everything you know that might in some way be related to the topic you are writing about.
Have a look at the short list of ideas I’ve compiled below. Any idea that comes to mind should be put down on paper, and you can weed out the weaker ones later. These are all the things that might jump to mind when you think of the effects of Brexit in the context of your essay topic:
Unemployment
Travel problems
Trade agreements might be affected
France shows signs of wanting to leave
The British economy dipped after Brexit
Rise in right-wing politics
You could add many ideas to this list, and you’ll see that we now already have a large amount of useful ideas that we could incorporate into our essay.
The next step in planning your essay is to see which of these ideas are actually useful to respond to the essay question. You could cut out all of the ones which seem like they might not help you to make the point you want to make. Then, try and list the useful ideas under each paragraph in your mind-map to see how they fit in with the essay you want to write. This will give you a much clearer idea of what you should be doing in each paragraph. For example, let’s just look at Para- graph 3 and how we would list relevant ideas under that:
Paragraph 3: Effects on British Economy
- Unemployment
- Trade agreements might be affected
- The economy dipped after Brexit
Now we have three points that we want to discuss under paragraph 3. Try and do this for all of the paragraphs in your essay before you move on to the next step, which is about writing a thesis statement.
The final kind of brainstorming which I’ll discuss here is for those times when you’re sitting in front of a blank screen or piece of paper and you can’t seem to get words down on paper. What I always do in those times is something called free writing. Free writing is about trying to write in a slightly more structured way, with full sentences, but this time you don’t stop writing until a set amount of time has elapsed. You can give yourself five or ten minutes, and write as much as you can during that time. Try and fill a page or even two pages during this time. You don’t have to worry about whether your writing is making sense. Don’t go back and erase anything, even if you make spelling or grammar errors. Just keep on writing what- ever comes to mind on your topic. This is a method of jolting your brain into thinking broadly about a topic, and it can be very useful during your planning phases. Once you’re done with the free writing exercise, go back over what you’ve written and you’ll often find a lot of useful content that you can transfer to the first draft of your essay. You can transfer the useful ideas or sentences into your mind-map.
Review Your Learning:
- Use the content and instruction words to form a basic outline of the structure of your essay
- Brainstorm ideas that you could use to fill out the paragraphs of your essay
- Rework your mind-map to include only the useful and relevant ideas
- Use free writing to get ideas on paper