Creating An Essay Plan: A Student Guide

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by: marthajensen
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Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2010 Time: 10:02 PM
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Students often have excellent knowledge of a topic, but their essay falls apart because of structure. Without the appropriate structure, essays can be difficult to read, and it can be a struggle to get the essay's point across. Structure helps students portray their ideas in a logical manner and is the backbone of any good essay. An essay plan is what can make or break an essay's structure.
With these three simple steps, anyone can plan an essay correctly, and improve their grades.
1. The Thesis
Every essay needs a point, a hypothesis or some form of argument. This is called the thesis. It is the one overriding argument that the essay makes. Your paragraphs will each have unique points, but they will all point towards this thesis. The first step to choosing a thesis is to look at the essay topic.
For example:
"Writers often explore human experiences. Explain how a novel has used language techniques to explore a human experience. A human experience could include (but is not exclusive to) racism, grief, coming of age or family."
This essay question is basically a theme question. The first step to choosing your thesis in this case would be to pick a human experience that is relevant to the novel. For example, if studying The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (Little, Brown & Company, 2002), the most obvious theme that is a 'human experience' would be grief. Now we want to turn our essay topic into a question that relates to both our chosen theme and novel.
For example:
"How has Alice Sebold used language techniques to portray the human experience of grief in her novel, The Lovely Bones?"
By turning the essay topic into a question, it gives us something to answer. This answer will become the thesis for the essay. To continue with The Lovely Bones novel, we can answer the essay question as such:
"Alice Sebold uses language techniques to show how grief can bring a family closer together, or tear them apart, in her novel The Lovely Bones."
The above essay thesis addresses the essay topic, answers the created essay question, and creates a line of argument that can be explored with the paragraphs. The essay thesis will be the foundation for a strong essay structure.
2. Turning the thesis into paragraphs
From this thesis we can create an essay plan that paragraphs will be based on. You will need to know how long your essay is expected to be. Excluding the introduction and conclusion, for this example we will look at three paragraphs, but this format can be applied to as many paragraphs as necessary. What we want to create is three lines of argument that prove our thesis "grief can bring a family closer together or tear them apart". Here are three points, that are unique, but all link to this argument:
Joe and Abigail are torn apart because of grief.
Susie and Joe are brought closer together because of grief.
Joe and Buckley are torn apart, then brought closer together because of grief.
3. Finding evidence to back up your paragraph statements
The above covers part of the thesis: 'grief can bring a family closer together or tear them apart', but the second half 'language techniques' is just as essential to consider when planning an essay. This part of the essay question/topic is the evidence that will prove your thesis. Without it, your essay will fall flat.
In this step you need to find language techniques that prove these statements are true. For a plan, you do not need to go into great detail, but it is important to have some top-line ideas that back up your statements. Taking the paragraph statement "Joe and Buckley are torn apart, then brought closer together because of grief", we need to find a technique in the novel that proves this. The 'garden scenes' may be the most appropriate to use as evidence of this. Buckley's garden is a metaphor for his grief. When the garden is growing, it shows he is moving on, but when Joe upsets him, he stomps on the garden, crushing out his hope and bringing back his grief. This scene demonstrates how Joe and Buckley are pulled apart because of Joe's grief. Another technique (or if possible the same metaphor) will be needed to show how Joe and Buckley are then brought back together because of grief.
It is important to be able to place a language technique beside each paragraph statement in your plan. Without it, writing the essay becomes difficult and if it is not included you will not be answering the full question.
It is common for students to go off-topic when answering essays, and the above steps will both prevent this, and create a foundation for an excellent essay structure. In the end, having the knowledge to answer the essay question is only half the battle. A strong essay plan is what will drive that knowledge home.

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Students often have excellent knowledge of a topic, but their essay falls apart because of structure. Without the appropriate structure, essays can be difficult to read, and it can be a struggle to get the essay's point across.