How to Write Better Essays

Planning in the exam

Once you’re in the exam the same principles apply: spend the first five

to ten minutes writing down your plan. Don’t get panicked into writing

too soon, before you have exhausted all of your ideas and got them

organised into a coherent, well structured plan, that answers the ques-

tion with strict relevance.

Indeed, there are strong reasons for going even further than this. It

makes very good sense to plan all the questions you have to do, before

you pick up your pen to write the first one. Each time you plan an essay

you set your subconscious mind tasks to undertake and questions to

answer. Except in the strongest of questions, which you know exactly

how you’re going to answer, there are always arguments, points, evi-

dence and examples that you can’t remember exactly.

This is understandable: you’re trying to brainstorm, to get the ideas

down as quickly as possible as they come tumbling out. Therefore,

unless it’s a central issue that will shape the whole essay, you don’t

want to stop the flow just to make sure you’ve got every detail on one

168 Planning

Practice exercise 14

Typical questions

Take just one topic on your syllabus, preferably one that you’ve already

covered, with which you’re fairly familiar.

You’ve already collected some past papers. Usually, around ten is suf-

ficient to identify the major issues and approaches to the topic, that form

the basis for questions.

List all the questions that have appeared on the topic you’ve chosen,

recording the date on which they appeared. You should now be able to

see recurring types. Some may appear every year, others once every two

years. But it should be clear that there are only a limited number of types

of questions, say four or five.

If you find that you have many more than this, it may be because you

don’t realise that a question differently phrased is in fact the same as

another. This is often the case. Sometimes it’s not until you try to plan

it that you realise it’s taking the same pattern as another. Therefore, if

in doubt, try planning those you’re not sure of.

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