planning and drafting essays

Have you ever borrowed some books to start your research and realised you did not know where to begin? Have you ever spent time reading a great deal of information that in the end was irrelevant to the essay or assignment you were working on? Have you ever started to write your essay and realised you had too much information on one topic, and not enough information on another topic? If you write the first draft of your essay plan before you begin your research, you will be organised and prepared, and you will save time. You must write the first draft of your essay plan before you start your research. This will give your research direction and ultimately make it easier for you to write your essay. Having a plan will let you know what you need to research and how much research you need on each topic or subject that you will be writing about. You will base this first draft of your essay plan on your essay question, and your current knowledge of your subject. You will not often be asked to write an essay on a topic you know nothing about, since you will already be studying the subject and will normally have had one or more lectures or tutorials on the topic. It is acceptable if your essay plan is rough or vague at this point, or if you do not have a great deal of detail. You will develop your essay plan (expanding it and including more detail) and possibly even change it as you go through the research process. What does a first draft of an essay plan look like? The first draft of your essay plan will show you what main topics you will discuss in your essay, how the essay will be structured, and roughly how many words you will spend on each part. If your essay question was 'Is Critical Thinking relevant to the role of a Registered Nurse?' and you had to write 1,500 words, then your essay plan might look like this: Essay question: 'Is Critical Thinking relevant to the role.
Essay writing is often so dreaded that many people avoid doing it until right before the paper is due. While some writers insist that they do their best work under pressure, more find that procrastinating does not serve them well. Procrastinating usually only adds to a sense of panic that leads otherwise good writers to throw anything together to meet the looming deadline. Worse, writers may bring the bad habit of procrastination with them to their next paper. It is time for writers to take back their power, write papers that reflect their true potential and earn better grades. Items you will need Preparing to Write Step 1 Highlight the due date on the assignment sheet. Write the paper’s due date in your calendar. Plan, however, to begin writing the paper one full week before it’s due instead, penciling in “Write Essay Draft today.” Step 2 Eliminate all distractions. Turn off the television, radio, or phone. Eat, get a glass of water, wear comfortable clothes and inform others of your writing plans. Gather all materials, including all class notes and texts. If writing by hand, have pens, pencils, and paper handy. If writing on a computer, have paper in the printer and jump or flash drives to save work frequently. Work at an uncluttered desk, either at home or at the library. Step 3 Prewriting (Generating Ideas) ? Free write: As fast as possible, write for five or ten minutes everything you know about the topic. Focus on identifying a main topic and supporting points by circling all repetition and patterns. ? List: Create headings for your topic and possible subtopics. List everything you know about each on paper or on a large whiteboard. Review the lists for repetition and patterns. Circle all common elements for a possible main idea. ? Cluster: Place the main idea/topic in a circle, with supporting ideas branching off from this center. ? Diagram: Place your main.
 As you rough out an initial draft, keep your planning materials (lists, diagrams, outlines, and so on) close at hand. In addition to helping you get started, such notes and blueprints will help you to keep moving. Writing tends to flow better when it is drafted relatively quickly, without many starts and stops. For most kinds of writing, an introduction announces a main idea, several body paragraphs develop it, and a conclusion drives it home. You can begin drafting, however, at any point. For example, if you find it difficult to introduce a paper that you have not yet written, you can draft the body first and save the introduction for later. DRAFT AN INTRODUCTION THAT INCLUDES A THESIS. For most writing tasks, your introduction will be a paragraph of 50 to 150 words. Perhaps the most common strategy is to open the paragraph with a few sentences that engage the reader and to conclude it with a statement of the essay's main point. The sentence stating the main point is called a thesis. For information on thesis development, click here. Ideally, the sentences leading to the thesis should hook the reader, perhaps with one of the following: a startling statistic or unusual fact a vivid example a description a paradoxical statement a quotation or bit of dialogue a question an analogy a joke or an anecdote Such hooks are particularly important when you cannot assume your reader's interest in the subject. Hooks are less necessary in scholarly essays and other writing aimed at readers with a professional interest in the subject. AS YOU DRAFT THE BODY, KEEP YOUR THESIS IN MIND. Before drafting the body of an essay, take a careful look at your introduction, focusing especially on your thesis sentence. What does the thesis promise readers? Try to keep this focus in mind.  It is a good idea to have a plan in mind as well. If your thesis sentence outlines a plan or if you have.
Mobile site | Accessibility | Help | About S3 | Contact S3 Get Flash to see this player. Transcript below SebThird year Physics with Management studentView Seb's student perspective Transcript What is it like writing essays on your course and do you have any tips?Not only do we have to write essays on my course, we also have to write lab reports mainly towards the end of every term. All I can say is plan in advance and give yourself plenty of time to write these. It's better to write one or two hours a day rather than doing it all on the last night because what happened to me, luckily in my first year when it didn't count, the lecturer was kind enough to say: ‘OK write your lab report, hand it in, I will mark it and then give it back and then you can change anything, take on board my feedback and then hand it in again'. I thought that was brilliant, so I got it back and thought, ‘OK, I'll do this at some point' and I kept putting it off and then on the last night I was like OK I really have to do this now and I was really tired and I just crammed it in, did everything and handed it in. It turned out I got a worse mark than I did the first time. So I went straight up there and complained, I said: ‘How is this possible?' and then the lecturer kindly showed me that I mixed up two different essays I wrote. So, because I was under so much pressure getting this all done on time, I mixed them up and I must have copied something in the wrong document and nothing worked - I had different diagrams that were completely unrelated. So it is very, very important to proofread! Ask your friends you live with to proofread. Maybe you are lucky enough to have an English student in your house - I'm lucky to have that, so do get plenty of people to proofread it. You have to proofread it and that will definitely help you and please give yourself as much time as possible to get your essays.
Students have very different approaches to drafting their essays. Some use a 'linear' approach, starting at the introduction and writing sequentially through to the conclusion. Others prefer a more 'recursive' approach where they work on one section for a time, move on to another part of the essay, and then return to the earlier section. We would not want to argue for any single approach. However there are several techniques worth employing. One is to have a fairly clear notion of the structure of the essay before you do too much drafting. (Have a look to see how the early provisional plan has been developed into a final elaborated plan.) You will find that the flow of words will come more easily if you know in advance how the different parts of the essay are likely to hang together. Another technique is to commit yourself to an introduction as early as possible. In the introduction, you should be looking to outline to the reader i) the structure of the essay and ii) your main argument. Your draft introduction will provide an initial anchor for the rest of the piece, even if later you find that you need to modify it. Click on the highlighted text to see the comments. Read the following two draft introductions. Which seems to be the more adequate? Introduction 1 Divorce is increasingly a problem in society and sociologists have provided a number of different explanations for it happening. The first type of explanation can be characterised as a legal one. Bilton et al., (1987) who represent this position, say that increased divorce is not necessarily due to families becoming more unstable, mainly because they suggest it is simply not possible to find this information out. Bilton et al. believe instead that increased divorce is related more to changes in family law. They do not think however, that new laws are the cause of divorce, but are a kind of solution for.