Grant Andrews - Essay Writing Skills: Planning Your Essay

Copyright 2017 by Grant Andrews

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Academic Coaching

Editing, Coaching and CounselingServices

For Thesis Writing

www.writeyourthesis.com

Academic Coaching is run by Dr. Grant Andrewsand Malan van der Walt

The Academic Coaching team offers free contentto help anyone writing a thesis, essay or article. We provide freeshort books on every topic relating to thesis writing, as well asstep-by-step guides on how to plan, research and write youracademic piece. If you would like to request that we compile atutorial or eBook that you need, or if you have any questions,please email us at .

Our services also include editing, coaching andcounseling. We coach our clients through all stages of essay andthesis writing, and host online workshops and writing marathons.You can find our pricing guide on our website, www.writeyourthesis.com .

We hope this short guide can help you to make asuccess of your academic work!

If youre still learning how to write anacademic essay, it can be extremely challenging. There are a lot ofskills involved and a lot of elements that you have to include towrite a good essay. In this short guide, well be looking at all ofthe steps that go into planning an essay. There are many more shortbooks about essay writing on our website, www.writeyourthesis.com ,so once youve planned your essay, head over there to learn aboutthe next step in your essay writing process.

This short guide should take you less than 30minutes to work through, and well cover everything you need toknow about planning an essay. Well look at how to understandall of the requirements of the topic or question, looking atinstruction and content words in the topic. Well discuss how togenerate ideas through brainstorming, mind-maps or freewriting. Well cover refining those ideas in order to constructyour essays thesis statement. And finally, well talk aboutplanning paragraphs so that you know exactly which ideasyoull be looking at throughout your essay.

Once your essay is properly planned, itll be alot easier and much quicker to write it. We suggest that if you arecurrently working on an essay, you go through each of the steps inthis guide as you read through it, so that by the time you reachthe end you will have your essay fully planned.

To start, lets look at how to understand youressay question or topic.

Your essay topic might seem very simple andstraightforward when you first read it, but there could be a lot ofaspects that are being asked of you that you dont see the firsttime you look at the topic. You need to be sure that your essayanswers all of the different components of the question, anddoesnt provide any information which is irrelevant to thetopic being discussed.

Lets look at an example. Imagine that this isthe essay topic that youre given:

In Antoine de Saint-Exuprys novella The Little Prince, the titular Princefeels torn between his wanderlust and his love for the rose hecared for on his home planet. Write an essay of 3000 words in whichyou discuss and compare the Princes relationships with the roseand the fox he meets on Earth. Do you think that the Prince iscomforted by the fox?

There are many different elements being asked ofyou, and in order to get a passing grade for your essay, you needto address all of them.

The first things to look out for in an essaytopic are the instruction words. These are words that tellyou what type of essay you should write, what types of actions youshould take and how your response should look. These are words likeanalyze, discuss, compare, consider, and many more. You needto make sure that you know what each different instruction word isasking you to do.

Instruction words will usually tell you whattype of essay you should write. If you are told to compare two ormore things, you are writing a comparative essay. If you aretold to discuss one topic in detail, you are writing adiscursive essay. You can find more information about thesedifferent types of essays on the Academic Coaching website, but fornow, lets try and look at the instruction words in the topicabove.

You could highlight the instruction words inyour topic so that they stand out. For example:

In Antoine de Saint-Exuprys novella The Little Prince, the titular Princefeels torn between his wanderlust and his love for the rose hecared for on his home planet. Write anessay of 3000 words in which you discuss and compare thePrinces relationships with the rose and the fox he meets on Earth. Do you think that the Prince is comfortedby the fox?

One of the instruction phrases that was a bitvaguer was the final one highlighted, namely Do you think, whichis instructing you to give an opinion. Youll need to readyour topic carefully to pick up on any subtle instructions likethis.

Based on this, we can see that we are beingrequired to write an essay that does three things, namelydiscuss something, compare something and give anopinion on something.

To find out what we are discussing, comparingand opining about, we have to look out for the second type ofkeywords in essay topics, namely content words. These arewords that tell us what the content of our essays need to be. Thesewords help us to understand what the instruction words are askingus to do. Its important to remember that you need to includeall of the content words in your final essay. If you dont,your essay will be incomplete.

Lets underline the content words so that theystand out, but look different from the instruction words.

In Antoine de Saint-Exuprys novella The Little Prince, the titular Princefeels torn between his wanderlust and his love for the rose hecared for on his home planet. Write anessay of 3000 words in which you discuss and compare the Princesrelationships with the rose and the fox he meets on Earth. Doyou think that the Prince is comforted by the fox ?

The content words are any keywords that theinstruction words are asking you to look at. Ive also included thephrase 3000 words since it lets us know how long our essay shouldbe, thus telling us something about the content of our essay.

Once youve highlighted all of the instructionand content words, read through the topic a few more times to seeif there are any other important things that youre being asked todo in your essay. Then, make sure that you understand eachindividual term or phrase on its own. Do you know what it means todiscuss or compare something? If not, consult some ofthe resources on the Academic Coaching website which can give youmore information about this.

Once you understand exactly whats expected ofyou, you can move on to the second phase of planning your essay,which is brainstorming and creating a mind-map of your ideas.

Review Your Learning:

• Instruction words tell you how you should constructyour essay. They clarify essay styles and methods of analysis