Write An Essay With Me #2 Planning

This week we're taking a dive into planning your essay. This is the key part to making sure everything else goes as smoothly as possible.

Where to start

First - write out the question. Take a note of the key points in it.

Humanity - Frankenstein are the two in this question since the question is shorter but very broad.

After this it's mind map time!

This is where you narrow down what you'll actually be talking about since you won't be able to fit everything into one essay.

So this is a very quick and simple mind-map - I've not gone into too much detail here, mostly with ideas for things to follow up in my research (the next stage!).

I have colour coded each individual area I want to focus on; Victor is one of the key characters to talk about since he's a human and he's going to be good to compare with the Monster who isn't necessarily human. Because we're looking at humanity these two are really important.

If you were going to be writing about Harry Potter and talking about the same topic then you would look at characters like Voldemort and Lupin, maybe, since they're key characters to the plot who also have conflicts about humanity and morality.

In yellow I have Shelley's Life, this is because whenever I'm writing about something I always like to include context. Since I'm a big fan of The Romantic Poets, I know from the top of my head that I can work in details of her life to support my writing.

And finally we get to the light blue section! This is where I've made a note about texts I could compare with Frankenstein as that was part of the original instructions. I've chosen The Terror since there's a ship on the ice and it involves a delve into morality and humanity.

Turning mind maps into plans

This is probably my favourite part of the planning process!

So below you'll see the bullet pointed plan and it's not that hard to go from a mind map to having something like that. You just need to think about which points are strongest, and which you know you'll get a wealth of research on. For me that looks a bit like this;

Rough plan of an essay; introduction, body paragraphs (x3), conclusion

I know I want to focus on the comparison of Victor and the Monster. I know one of my main points here will be talking about the fact I keep calling him a "Monster" in my notes, but is he? Is there a better term for him? So I've put these as the main paragraphs.

But before that I want to include context, so everything about Shelley's life goes here. After the comparison of the two characters I want to bring in the other text, so that's my third 'section'. And then all that's left is to fit in the introduction and conclusion.

Putting Your Plan In A Spreadsheet

This is the final stage of planning and perhaps one of the most important in my opinion. This, along with the bullet pointed list is what you'll be referring back to as you write your essay.

Using your bullet pointed list you want to create your sections for your essay. You put them into a table along with the approximate word count you want each section to have, and how far along you are with writing this.

I also include rough due dates for each section. This gives me mini-deadlines so that I'm not in a panic trying to rush to write everything. I'll give myself enough time to write everything, and then add some time for editing and proof-reading at the end.

I never missed a deadline with this method!

What this means is that you will never look at something you've written and think "Oh no, I've messed up" because you've written far too much for your introduction and not enough for the actual meat of the essay. You have everything planned out in so much detail that it should be as simple as re-writing it to sound a bit better than just " -The Monster as he's known to many in popular culture is more appropriately called a creature. / - This does not mean he is any less human, in fact he displays some of the more human-like moments in the text".

NEXT WEEK: RESEARCH

Tune in next week to hear all about how I start doing my research and what that means for this plan I just created.

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Hey! Tara here and thanks for checking out my blog. I update every Tuesday with posts about studying tips, advice and talk about productivity and organisation too. If you want to keep up to date with my latest blog posts I’d love it if you subscribed to this blog.