Planning and Structuring Your Writing

Planning and Structuring Your Writing

Writing for an assessment is slightly different than writing for other purposes. You will need to plan and structure your writing, your first draft is not what you submit for marking. Understanding your assessment brief and answering the question is what you are aiming to achieve within your writing.

The first step is setting time aside is get familiar with your assessment brief. Read it slowly and carefully. Set aside time to do this. One of the main reasons why students do not do as well as they could is due to not answering the question posed.  

Think about the question in context

Understanding the context makes your understanding of the question clearer. Underline the keywords, if you do not understand any of them, take a moment to look them up. This will help you to identify the important information in the question and to clarify what you are being asked to do. 

Re-read the question

Think about it as a whole. Break it down into sub-questions:

• What is the question asking? 
• Why is this important? 
• What do I need to find out?  

Assessment guidance

The understanding assessment brief page provides greater detail

including ensuring that you tell your lecturer as soon as possible, if you are unsure what you are expected to do. 

Generating ideas 

Once you are confident that you know exactly what the assessment brief is asking you to do, note down your initial thoughts about the assessment question. You might find a mind map helpful here, or freely write what you know without worrying about punctuation, grammar or spelling. This will be important later on, but generating ideas is more important at this stage. 

Note things such as: 

• What you already know about the topic (from lectures, seminars) 
• What you need to find out in order to answer the question 
• Your initial response(s) to the question 

This list will inform your reading by helping you to identify relevant books, chapters, journal articles.  

After reading, clarify the key points in writing. A mind map could help you to do this. It is useful to note brief details of authors and text including date and page numbers. Doing this will help you find key issues and a pathway through all the ideas that you have generated. You are now ready to focus on planning your essay. 

Approaches to planning 

When preparing to write an essay, start by making a plan. If you rush in and write everything you think of down, your ideas will not be communicated effectively. Grouping ideas together will make much stronger arguments and will help you to work out a logical structure for your essay before you start writing. 

There is more than one way to plan an essay. You might prefer to list the main points using bullet points, or to create a detailed plan with sub-points and evidence (author, date, page number). Some people prefer visual plans such as a mind map which enable you to see your main ideas on a page. You can then number your ideas. 

Structuring writing 

Good essays are carefully structured. The text is continuous and flowing. There are no section headings in essays and it is therefore important to organise the body of the essay into paragraphs. Each paragraph addresses a different aspect of the issues. Each paragraph should link to the ones before and after it. There is no template for a model essay. 

An essay consists of three basic parts: 

Introduction 

Body 

Conclusion