An Essay Plan
You shouldn’t try to build an essay plan until you have a pile of information. (Honest. You’ll have trouble if you imagine how your essay will run before you go hunting for material that’s actually there.) And you can’t go hunting for your pile of information until you’re clear about what question you’re going to answer with this essay plan. (I’ve said it a million times. An essay isn’t a meander. It’s an answer to a specific question.)
Well, say you’ve got your pile of information, which you’ve gathered because it looks relevant to the question you’ve been assigned. And now you’re going to put it all into a step-by-step answer, right?
Yes. But how? What do you do to create an essay plan?
First, examine what you have, and see where it clumps together, in similar kinds of information. Second, name those clumps, for the kind of information they contain. Third, extract the answer they all point to. Fourth, move the clumps into the best order for showing your eventual reader why they prove what they do. And fifth, write it up, in words no different from the ones you’d use in an oral explanation. I show how this works, in little steps, in my writing system. But let’s show you briefly how an essay plan forms.
Say you have to write on man’s return to the moon. You’ll go to the library and find all kinds of things, about proposed space vehicles, about developments in propulsion, about what we’ve learned about keeping astronauts healthy during long missions, and so on. You’ll notice patterns in what you find, so that information about funding space trips, say, will immediately seem like it belongs in its own pile. So will information about the military’s role in moon shots, when you find some of that. Ditto, the stuff you find about commercial reasons for trying to get to the moon. (Do we want to beat the Russians again? No, we want to make money now.) The more stuff you find, the more separate piles will form. Keep track of those. It’s the basis of your essay plan.
You’ll eventually decide that all the piles point to something. You might decide that a moon landing isn’t likely to happen in the next 30 years. You’ll decide this because you see it said, in perhaps several ways, in your information piles. That idea, that moon missions are all political fantasies for now, is the idea your essay plan will prove.
Write that idea down. Then in separate sections write each pile’s contribution to that argument. You’ll find it writes fast. There is no writer’s block if you have this essay plan in place.
Like I say, I show how to do this, down to sentence-level, in the writing system I sell. Suffice it to say for now that this general essay plan is the way it all works. And it does work.
>>Next, learn about Essay Format.
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