Introduction
As a result of what we did in the last stage, you should now have a
wealth of material to work with. Moreover, you should feel more con-
fident not just that you understand it well, but that you’ve success-
fully integrated it with your own ideas and made it your own. You’ve
processed it thoroughly at all levels: for comprehension; for analysis
and structure; and for criticism and evaluation. This should have left
you with clearly structured notes taken from what you’ve read, which
also record your own responses to the ideas in the form of criticism
and evaluation.
What’s more, you’ve now organised your retrieval system and your
time to ensure that you catch the best material, including your own
ideas, wherever and whenever it presents itself. You are, then, in a
much better position to meet the demands of an essay that asks you
to use the higher cognitive skills: to criticise, discuss and evaluate a
claim or an argument. Given this, you can now move on to plan your
essay; a stage that many regard as the most important, yet the most
neglected. In this stage we will look not just at planning the essay, but
at how this can improve your memory, your revision for the exam, and
your exam technique.Planning the essayWithout a plan you will always struggle to produce your best work. The
plan gives your essay a clear structure for examiners to follow as they
navigate their way through ideas and arguments that are unfamiliar to
them. Without this you’re likely to lose them, and if they can’t see why
your arguments are relevant, or they can’t see what you’re doing and
why, they cannot give you marks, no matter how good your work might
be. Even your weakest arguments gain strength from planning. A
carefully planned structure, which is clear, logical and relevant to the
question, lends support to an argument that, on its own, might not
be completely convincing.
In this stage we will look at the benefits of rehearsing your argu-
ments in detail before you write, by planning an essay we inter-
preted and brainstormed in the first stage. In this way we are able
to make sure that all of our arguments are relevant, that they are
clearly and consistently argued, and that we have sufficient evi-
dence to support them. It also reduces the risk of omitting some really
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