3 Making a Plan
One-minute overview: A plan is a point-form summary of the main ideas and supporting ideas you want to include in your essay. A plan sometimes uses a system of numbers and letters to indicate what points are main ideas and what points are supporting ideas. Planning is an important part of the writing process. In this book, planning follows thinking and researching as steps in the writing process, and, indeed, most writers probably do most of their planning at this point. But planning really begins when you annotate your assignment sheet and choose a topic, and it continues while you write and revise your essay. Always remember that planning an academic essay is an ongoing process, not a single step along the road to the production of a text. In this Chapter, you will learn about possible ways of planning an essay in the four modes in which academic essays are generally written:
Planning an informative essay
Planning a compare/contrast essay
Planning a persuasive essay
Planning an informative essay
The key to planning an informative essay lies in the way in which the topic is framed. If you are asked to describe a process, your plan will likely highlight the stages of that process. If you are asked to define a concept, your plan will likely highlight the elements of the definition and/or the examples you plan to use to illustrate the concept. If you are asked to analyse something, a poem, for example, your plan will likely highlight those features (form, theme, metaphor) of the poem you wish to discuss.
Your plan can be detailed or sketchy. You can use a system of numbers and letters to indicate titles and subtitles or simple dashes and indentations. Your plan is made of clay, not granite. You will likely want to massage it throughout the writing process to change it as you discover new insights into and new information about your topic.
Suppose, for example, you are to write an essay briefly tracing the history of the English language. Such a topic would pre-suppose a chronological plan:
| Title: English: The First One Thousand Years | ||
| Thesis: Since its beginnings a thousand years ago, English has evolved and changed under the influence of a variety of social and historical forces. | ||
| I. | Old English | |
| A | The influence of the Angles and the Saxons | |
| B | The Celtic influence | |
| C | The Vikings | |
| D | Old English Literature | |
| II. | Middle English | |
| A | The Norman Conquest | |
| B | Chaucer | |
| C | The printing press | |
| III. | Modern English | |
| A | William Shakespeare | |
| B | The King James Version of the Bible | |
| C | The Discovery of the New World | |
| Conclusion: English continues to evolve and change under the influence of technical innovations and a shrinking world. |
With a plan such as this, your transition to paragraphing is facilitated because you can concentrate less on where the paragraph will go and more on how it will read, at least in its first draft. Here, for example, are drafts of the paragraphs that would follow from Part I, sections A and B of the above plan.
Old English is a Germanic language, born in the wake of the invasion of England by German Tribes, most notably, the Angles and the Saxons, during the fifth century. “England,” in fact, is a derivation of “Angleland.” Their language was a branch of Indo-European, which dates back to about 5000 B. C. and from which modern European and even some Asian languages developed.
When the Angles and the Saxons landed on English shores, they were met by an even earlier group of Indo-Europeans, the Celts, whom they forced north and west, where today live Celtic descendants, the Welsh, Scots, and Irish. The Celts were no strangers to invaders, having been victims of Roman imperialism from 55 B.C. to the early part of the fifth century, when the mighty Roman Empire began to collapse. Some English place names, Manchester and Winchester, for example, are derived from the Roman word “castra,” meaning “camp. ”
The Celts fought hard against the German invaders and under one King, Artorius—probably the legendary King Arthur—had some success. But the Anglo-Saxons were determined to mine the rich minerals and farm the fertile soil of this beautiful island and soon routed the Celts, adding insult to injury by calling them “wealas,” which means foreigners and which is the Anglo-Saxon root word for Wales and Welsh.
Planning a compare/contrast essay
The compare/contrast essay, in which you are asked to discuss the similarities and differences between two related subjects (two literary works, two economic systems, two political systems, two psychological theories) is commonly assigned in most college and university courses. There are two ways of organising a compare/contrast essay: the common traits method or the similarities/differences method.
The common traits method is the best method to use if you are writing primarily an informative essay. If you are writing an essay comparing London and Paris, for example, you might decide to highlight the people, the climate, and the architecture in which case your plan might look like this:
| Comparing and Contrasting London and Paris | |||
| Thesis: In various interesting ways, the people, the climate, and architecture of Paris and London are similar to and different from each other. | |||
| I | People | ||
| A | London | ||
| reserved | |||
| polite | |||
| friendly in pubs | |||
| B | Paris | ||
| can seem rude | |||
| fun-loving | |||
|
pride
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