Part 5

Planning

Ideally, you should be ready to start composing the essay. Around your workspace, gather your notes, your resources and start reading through them again. This primes your thought process and will likely stimulate your writing too.

Perhaps you will find a way to organize your notes based on the topic, subheadings and the arguments and points you are trying to make. If they don’t have headings, give them new ones or decide which headings to include them in. The organizing of these notes will blossom into the beginning of an outline.

If you find you are ready to start writing, even parts of the essay, go ahead. Don’t worry about order, and never begin with the introduction. That will come later. These parts of the body of the essay are the real meat of the paper. The beauty of word-processing programs is that ordering is as easy as cutting and pasting later.

The Outline

Somewhere along the process a plan will formulate in your head. It will likely take the form of a series of heading with subheadings, derived from your notes. Just like the best lectures you may have attended, or the best presentations, it is the plan that leads you, or a reader, from beginning to end. And the end is usually more satisfying when it has been travelled to along this path.

It should be your goal to lead the reader of your essay gracefully through your paper. A degree of concentration is required for someone to grade or evaluate an essay, and you want to make this process as easy as possible for the grader to garner your paper with praise.