A short guide to essay planning and structure.
Good essay practice should include:-Planning. Make sure you write a brief plan for your answer. In your plan you should identify very clearly around six distinct points you intend to make and the specific parts of the text that you intend to examine in some detail.Planning an essay Planning starts with understanding your task, how much time you have, the number of words you have to write and what direction you're going to take. Before you embark on research, give yourself realistic goals for the amount of material you need by sketching out a plan for length. Download an essay plan template.Planning is vital, so before jumping into the essay flesh out a decent plan. Specify the content of each paragraph with a topic sentence in order to guide the examiner through your argument. When planning it's a good idea to reference where quotes are so you don't forget to include them.
Returning once more to the textile metaphor, this is the part of the essay in which you take the threads of the argument you have mentioned in your introduction and flesh them out to make part of the picture. Conclusion: At A level you are not required to write a long conclusion, really it only needs a couple of lines.As a general rule-of-thumb, you should allocate about 5 minutes of planning time for each hour of the exam. Your plan should be a very rough bullet-pointed outline of each topic you want to cover in your answer. By jotting down a quick plan, you instantly have a structure for your essay.
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