How to Write Better Essays

Now that you’ve completed two practice exercises, on editing and

ordering your material, and on rehearsing your ideas in detail, it’s time

to do the same with the question you originally chose from one of your

courses. You’ve interpreted this question and completed the research

on it. In the following assignment, you are creating the plan from which

you will write the essay.

In the next chapter

In this assignment we’ve gone as close as we can to writing the essay

without actually doing so. There are very few essays that don’t benefit

from this. If we fail to do it, there will always be unforeseen problems

that slow down our writing and break up the flow of our words. Even

more important, as we will see in the next two chapters, having

rehearsed our arguments we will be left, for each question, with plans

that will be invaluable in the exam, when we have to reproduce the

arguments under timed conditions.

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