How to Write Better Essays

The plans become your core revision material

Once this is done you will find these plans represent the core

material for your revision. In my revision classes we timetable

well in advance the topics we will be revising on any given day in

the run-up to the exam, so that everybody comes prepared with

their revision done and their plans stored in their memories. Then

we produce our lists of typical questions for that topic, from which

I select a question and give the students ten minutes to produce a

plan, in the same way they will have to in the exam. We all then take

a blank sheet of paper and try to produce our pattern or linear note

structures, whichever we’ve chosen as the right format for that

question. Having completed that, we compare our results. Then we

go through all the remaining typical questions on our lists in the

same way.

As a result, revision takes on a far less daunting, less forebod-

ing presence. In effect the students know that if there are, say, six

topics that they know will come up on the paper, and there are four

typical questions on each topic, then they have just 24 essay plans to

commit to memory and recall under timed conditions. Most of them

cope with this without any problem. Certainly it is much more

manageable than the heaps of unstructured notes they might face

otherwise.

To make revision even easier, throughout the year we have regular

sessions of this. As we complete each topic on our syllabus, time will

be set aside so that students can do timed essays and timed plans. As

a result, by the end of the course they will have written or planned

every typical essay question, under timed conditions. Most students

will know them well, and have very little trouble recalling and writing

them in the exam.

Even if you don’t get in the exam exactly the question you’ve revised,

your structured plans will enable you to recall all the material you need

to answer the question. It may be that you get a hybrid question that

calls upon you to select from more than one structure and then

combine the relevant parts into a new plan. It’s probably true to say

that at least 80 per cent of success in any exam is due to organisation,

and the major component of this is the structured plans you create

throughout the course, and then commit to memory, so you can recall

them in the exam.

Revising for the Exam 167

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