How to: plan a good essay (English Literature)
Hello, Reader!
The first thing you’ll do when getting an essay question is - shocker - read the question. What you may not realise is that there is actually a “right” way to do that. Spot the keywords; is it asking you to ‘explore’? ‘Compare’? What do you need to explore or compare? What’s the topic of your essay? If you’re given the freedom to choose your own topic, write a title that’s focused and specific which will help you stick to your topic throughout the entire essay. This will help you make sure that what you’re writing is relevant rather than rambling on about something unnecessary.
Okay, you know what you have to write about - now what? You should pick 3 overarching points you will make. Less than 3 points simply won’t give you enough opportunity to really dig into the question and hit all the marks. On the other hand, trying to fit more than 3 points could leave you with undeveloped ideas and quotes that aren’t analysed in enough detail. Of course, you could benefit from more than 3 points if you’re working on a longer piece of writing, e.g. your coursework, but if you’re under time pressure (exam practice, timed essays etc.), your best bet is to stick to 3. You should know your texts well enough to be able to think of a few points straight away and choose the strongest 3; the ones that follow on from each other but don’t overlap and can easily be supported by comments on structure and form.
For each of your points, you should come up with 2-3 quotes and make sure, again, that they’re your strongest ones. These quotes should ideally come from different parts of the texts (e.g. one from the beginning, one from the middle etc.) to show that you actually read the text and understand it throughout. If you find that you can’t say much about a quote - choose a better one! If you’re really struggling to find a better quote, at least find an additional one to complement it or compare it to enhance your argument. Bear in mind that sometimes it’s more appropriate to make an argument about the structure or the form of the text rather than use a quote and you should try to include at least one argument about the two.
Before writing anything yet, analyse every single quote. Use mind maps, bullet points, anything that helps you blow up a quote and analyse it in depth. At first include everything; contextual analysis, the wording of the quote, impact on the reader… anything you can think of about this quote. After you have this entire map of analysis for the quote, choose the strongest points to include in your essay. These should be relevant, show off your understanding of literary techniques and answer the essay question. By the time exams come, you should be able to do the majority of this in your head. Doing so many practice papers allowed me to find my favourite quotes to use and the strongest points for my analysis. There are only so many themes and topics a question can ask you about so you can reuse the same arguments for multiple different essay questions, you just have to be smart with it. Regardless of whether you’re under time pressure or not, the really important things to include throughout your essay are contextual references and alternative interpretations of your evidence because that’s where a huge chunk of the marks are. Especially context - try to include it absolutely everywhere. This has to be written into your plan because it’s so easy to forget but it’s so important. If you’re really struggling with finding contextual comments to include, (I know it can be tough, especially with unseen texts,) you can always resort to an argument about how the contemporary reader/audience vs modern reader/audience would respond to the text. This is so easy to do because you can basically assume patriarchal and racist attitudes for all time periods and you’re set.
The last step is… to write the essay! At this point, you should have a detailed outline of your essay and you just need to dress it up into sophisticated words and names of literary devices. Make sure the essay reads smoothly and stays relevant to the question throughout. My last tip: at the end of each paragraph, refer back to the question - reword it in any way you can. For example, if the question is “explore the ways Shakespeare presents attitudes to women in Othello”, at the end of each one of my paragraphs I would write “... which Shakespeare uses to show xxx attitude to women in Othello.”
Today I’m spilling some secrets with you - how to plan a bomb essay! Now, I know that there are lots of different types of essays but I was fortunate enough that I only took one essay based subject for A Level which was English Literature. This means that throughout those two years, hundreds of essays later, I’ve perfected my process of planning one that hits all the spots. I guess you could use these general tips with some adjustments to other types of essays, but I genuinely wouldn’t know because I only ever wrote them for English Lit.
You might be wondering why I’m not writing a post about how to write a good essay rather than plan one and there’s a simple answer: planning is half of the work. The most important thing is that you do some form of planning. Making an effective plan for your written work helps you to keep your essay focused and concise and lets you get through the process of writing it quicker as you basically have the outline of your work already in front of you.
The first thing you’ll do when getting an essay question is - shocker - read the question. What you may not realise is that there is actually a “right” way to do that. Spot the keywords; is it asking you to ‘explore’? ‘Compare’? What do you need to explore or compare? What’s the topic of your essay? If you’re given the freedom to choose your own topic, write a title that’s focused and specific which will help you stick to your topic throughout the entire essay. This will help you make sure that what you’re writing is relevant rather than rambling on about something unnecessary.
Okay, you know what you have to write about - now what? You should pick 3 overarching points you will make. Less than 3 points simply won’t give you enough opportunity to really dig into the question and hit all the marks. On the other hand, trying to fit more than 3 points could leave you with undeveloped ideas and quotes that aren’t analysed in enough detail. Of course, you could benefit from more than 3 points if you’re working on a longer piece of writing, e.g. your coursework, but if you’re under time pressure (exam practice, timed essays etc.), your best bet is to stick to 3. You should know your texts well enough to be able to think of a few points straight away and choose the strongest 3; the ones that follow on from each other but don’t overlap and can easily be supported by comments on structure and form.
For each of your points, you should come up with 2-3 quotes and make sure, again, that they’re your strongest ones. These quotes should ideally come from different parts of the texts (e.g. one from the beginning, one from the middle etc.) to show that you actually read the text and understand it throughout. If you find that you can’t say much about a quote - choose a better one! If you’re really struggling to find a better quote, at least find an additional one to complement it or compare it to enhance your argument. Bear in mind that sometimes it’s more appropriate to make an argument about the structure or the form of the text rather than use a quote and you should try to include at least one argument about the two.
Now, you can finally take all of this information you have and order it into a logical structure. Which one of your 3 points should go first? Does the second one lead on from it? How can you arrange the quotes and the analysis for the paragraphs to read smoothly? It’s like a puzzle - you’ve got all the pieces now you just have to figure out where everything goes.
The last step is… to write the essay! At this point, you should have a detailed outline of your essay and you just need to dress it up into sophisticated words and names of literary devices. Make sure the essay reads smoothly and stays relevant to the question throughout. My last tip: at the end of each paragraph, refer back to the question - reword it in any way you can. For example, if the question is “explore the ways Shakespeare presents attitudes to women in Othello”, at the end of each one of my paragraphs I would write “... which Shakespeare uses to show xxx attitude to women in Othello.”
We finally made it to the end! Hopefully, this helps you with some of your essays or that maybe you find a step you will adopt into your writing process - either way thank you for making it this far into my post! Since it is pretty long, I figured I’ll also share my plan for this blog post, which can serve as a quick and easy summary to refer to whenever you need a bit of inspiration.
Happy essay writing!
Love, Agnes xo
Love, Agnes xo
Comments
Post a Comment