Should you plan your essays? I imagine that this is the question that a lot of my students are really asking. Many of you come to me because you aren’t happy with what’s offered in schools. What teachers tell you about how you need to plan and plan, but you’re not even sure about what to plan.

In class, I’ve seen students just start writing essays without even so much as a cold start. The writing just begins, and before you know it, an essay comes out. Whether it’s good or not is anybody’s guess.

In this piece, I’d like to address that phenomenon, and by the end of it, perhaps you’ll have some slightly stronger opinions about planning your essay.

The Legitimate Objection

People in the no-planning camp often tell me that they don’t plan because they want it all to come out naturally – They look at the topic or the prompt, and before you know it, they just start writing. In their minds, this feels like a better approach for a range of reasons, but the most common objection I’ve heard to planning is that it feels artificial, that plans don’t always come to reality, to a degree – that they are stifling.

And you know…

I think it is understandable that some people just want to wing it. 

Writing, at least in a way that a lot of people understand, seems to be something that should be free-flowing, creative, and unrestrained, even if it is true that the right thing in question is being produced for an exam and is going to be assessed.

I can’t object completely to that because it is entirely possible to write down a plan to start an essay and hope that you can follow the plan, but then to realize that your creative direction is taking things in another direction altogether – Maybe you wrote down a particular point, and then you realized that by the end of your first paragraph, you are unable to follow your plan anymore because you’re not sure how to proceed.

As a writer, teacher, and content creator, I can personally attest to the benefits of planning. My plans are not extensive. Often, they just consist of a few points that I know I want to talk about and an overall argument that I want to make. I don’t write everything down word for word, but the plan guides me and gives me structure in terms of knowing:

• what I need to talk about next
• how to transition
• eventually how to put flesh on the bones of a full essay

Even so, I would say planning is not for everyone, but it is an approach that at least deserves some experimentation on your part. After all, how do you know that planning is useless unless you’ve genuinely tried it yourself?

To that, I would add another thing: how would you know that planning is not for you if you were doing it wrong in the first place? 

That’s where these tips come in. 

If, by the end of these, you decide that planning is not for you, then it’s entirely up to you. Before any of that, here are some tips that you may find useful!

Some Tips on Essay Planning

#1: Practice connecting small parts of your plan together.

Try this – don’t write out a full essay plan just yet. Try writing two paragraphs based on a plan to see if you can actually execute on that part of your plan.

Why? Because a lot of students who try to plan out an essay do it in the following way:

1. They read the prompt.
2. They start writing down the main points they want to communicate, with maybe a few subpoints before they begin writing.
3. They get overwhelmed by the whole plan, can’t connect the points, and end up unable to write based on the plan.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but the biggest issue comes about when they try to transition from one thing to another. Why? They don’t actually know how they are going to progress through their plan. Take a little extra time to link up your ideas mentally and inside your head as you dedicate some time to asking how things logically link up, and you will see that connecting them together will become easier over time.

#2: Evaluate how your plan comes together.

Plans often don’t come perfect. Often they are messy, incomplete, and require a little bit of Tailoring. In many cases, if a plan doesn’t work well, that doesn’t necessarily mean that planning in itself is bad. It can also mean that the plan needed to be refined. Therefore, ask yourself:

• Are there some ways my plans should have been made better or improved before I tried to execute them?
• Could there have been a smoother transition?
• What I wrote, be more logical?
• Did what I wrote in my plan really make sense relative to what I wanted to accomplish?

Often, thinking about this helps you to improve your plan bit by bit and step by step.

#3: Actually practice.

Plans are just scaffolding at the end of the day. If you write out a hundred plans but practice with none of them, it’s going to be as if you didn’t write down any plans at all.

The theory of understanding how things hang together loses out to the actual practical aspect of putting things down in words and logically connecting them minute by minute. Here, you can experience the practical benefit of planning rather than just thinking about doing it and then eventually giving up.

When you practice, you will see over time whether the issue really is with the planning as an activity, or if it’s just the way that your particular plan works out when you write essays – It is entirely possible that planning is not for you. Perhaps you could do better if you just were to wing it and try to work out everything procedurally and on the fly, let the words flow from your pen as you are creating the essay, without any forethought about what is going to come, but you will never know until you actually practice.

But here’s some advice that may be key to you if #1 to #3 don’t work.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on planning, and I hope that these thoughts are helpful for you.

Thank you for reading, and I hope this helps you out a bit!