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How To Write An essay Part 4 - Planning Your Essay

"When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing."
-- Enrique Jardiel Poncela

You've gone from an idea, to research, to a pile of random notes, to categorized notes. You're now ready to start planning how the essay will fit together.

Formal essays differ from informal essays in several ways, most of which will be covered in the section on writing. During the planning stage, you need to know whether or not the essay is going to be a formal one. If the teacher or professor didn't specify, they probably want it to be formal. An informal essay is one that doesn't necessarily rely on structure to make its point, such as an essay explaining how you personally feel on a given subject, or what you did last summer. Formal essays must have an underlying structure that makes sense so the reader doesn't have to wonder where you're going with your points.

For most of these instructions and tips, we'll assume you're working on a formal essay.

Start by putting the subgroups that you pulled out of your focus into a logical order. Consider the reader's point of view: they may not have read all the sources you have on your topic, and might need definitions first. If you're discussing a person's life and contributions as in our example, it's probably more logical to describe the person and their life before bringing in the bits about their contributions. If your subject is a historical overview of anything, it usually makes sense to move chronologically.

If you'll eventually be typing the entire essay on a computer, now would be a good time to move from written notes to computer documents. Here is how I would begin planning our example essay with the subgroups:

Widget watching information
definition of widget and widget watching
brief mention of widget watching during Smith's lifetime
Joe Smith's personal life
childhood
schooling
things that lead Smith to widget watching
adult life
death
Joe Smith's contributions to widget watching
the New York group
the widgetiscope
Smith's publications on widget watching
other contributions he made
Next, plan in the introduction and conclusion, and make sure each fits with the outline so far. In our example, I would include the widget watching information in an introductory paragraph, so I'll absorb that into the introduction in the outline:

Introduction
Widget watching information
definition of widget and widget watching
brief mention of widget watching during Smith's lifetime
Joe Smith's personal life
childhood
schooling
things that lead Smith to widget watching
adult life
death
Joe Smith's contributions to widget watching
the New York group
the widgetiscope
Smith's publications on widget watching
other contributions he made
Conclusion
summary of why Smith was important to widget watching
Now it's time to add in the notes. Go through your notes and type in (or cut and paste, if they're already on the computer) the highlighted bits. Don't worry about their order yet, just make sure you get everything into the outline for now. Of course, I'm just making up the following for an example, and the outline could be much longer for a real topic.

Introduction
Widget Watching information
definition of widget and widget watching
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