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Should You Plan Your Essays?

Victor Tan
 

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.

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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!

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Blog Motivation

You Are Who You Choose to Spend Time With: On environment, language, and the conscious reshaping of our intellectual lives

Victor Tan
 

“You are the average of the five people you spend time with.”


I spent some time this morning reflecting on this familiar adage, turning it over in my mind alongside thoughts about my friendships and the trajectory of my life.

The more I considered it, the more profound it became. There’s no question that the people we spend time with shape our norms, expectations, and capabilities in ways both subtle and substantial.


The Environmental Architecture of Language

If decades of academic research into human language acquisition have taught us anything, it is this: we are deeply shaped by our environment.

The language parents speak to their children from birth forms the very first linguistic memories a child absorbs and later replicates through imitation.

Those of us who did not grow up with English as our first language understand this viscerally.

A child in rural China or India has no incentive to speak English daily—the environment provides none. Instead, they navigate the world through Mandarin, Tamil, or any of the myriad languages that form the rich tapestry of human communication.

The language spoken at home becomes the linguistic lens through which they view the world, shaping not only vocabulary but values, moral frameworks, and even which dictionary—English or Malay—they might one day reach for.

The Limits of Environmental Determinism

Of course, human beings are not merely products of their environments. Individual agency matters profoundly.

From Mandarin-speaking environments have emerged scholars of English literature. Jiang Zemin, former General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, rose from destitution to master multiple languages and lead a nation. The mathematical prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan, working in isolation from formal training, revolutionized mathematics through sheer intellectual force.

Critics of environmental determinism might invoke Noam Chomsky’s concept of the “poverty of the stimulus”—the observation that the linguistic input children receive from parents and caregivers cannot possibly account for the full complexity and creativity of their eventual language use. There must be something more, something internal, that drives our development.

This is true. And yet, it would be unwise to discount the profound role environment plays.

Explicit Rules and Tacit Knowledge

Traditional education tends to emphasize explicit rules: grammatical structures, punctuation conventions, the mechanics of avoiding comma splices. These are lessons that can be taught systematically, absorbed from textbooks, and applied with conscious effort.

But ask someone truly proficient in English—someone whose prose flows with natural eloquence—to explain why a particular turn of phrase works, and they often struggle to articulate it. I’ve observed this phenomenon countless times when questioning students who write exceptionally well. They cannot always explain their choices. They simply know.

This is tacit knowledge—the accumulated wisdom of countless interactions, texts read, patterns absorbed, habits compounded over time. It reshapes how we process, understand, and ultimately articulate language in ways that resist codification. It operates beneath conscious awareness, yet powerfully determines our linguistic capability.

Probability Is Not Destiny

Yes, someone living in an environment devoid of English speakers will very probably never speak English. The probability is higher. Much higher.
But probability is not destiny.

As human beings, we possess a remarkable capacity: we can reshape our environments. We can change whom we interact with, whom we spend time with. Those five friends—whether from family, school, workplace, or public life—can be consciously varied.

Are we not free to choose? Must we accept environments that limit us? Should we settle for spending time with those who refuse to grow, who remain content with mediocrity? Or can we seek out people who share our goals, motivations, and aspirations for excellence?

That conscious choice shapes our trajectory. And it is a choice we must recognize we possess.

Beyond People: Reshaping Your Linguistic Landscape

But environments consist of more than just people. We can also reshape the content we consume, the words we encounter daily.

It is not destined that we spend our days doom-scrolling through social media captions and Instagram reels. We have the option to read substantive blog posts, to engage with the great books that have shaped human thought across centuries – to expose ourselves to good writing and to speech and things that more represent what we want to be as we move from where we are towards a better life.

This is the harder choice, of course. Most people don’t make it.

But precisely because it is both harder and more beneficial, it holds the key to the mastery that so many casually abandon. The path less traveled rewards those brave enough to walk it.

By reading this post today, you’ve already begun to reshape your environment in small but meaningful ways.

Thank you for being part of this journey.
If you’d like to extend that commitment, I invite you to explore our vibrant member section, where you’ll find sample works, detailed resources, and a community dedicated to linguistic excellence and intellectual growth.

Whether you’re writing from Beijing or Bangalore, Cape Town or rural Kentucky, you’re welcome to join us in consciously reshaping the environment of language and thought we inhabit.

The choice, as always, is yours.


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Blog First Language English IGCSE English Paper 2 Sample Essays

Descriptive Essay Reflection and Breakdown:  Write a description with the title, ‘The artist’. (May 2025 Variant 2, Question 3) 

Victor Tan
 

Welcome back, friends!

Five weeks in, and I’ve been noticing how strangely we talk about artists. We have this enormous vocabulary for describing art—composition, texture, palette, form, technique—but when we try to describe the artist themselves, we fall back on tired clichés: “tortured genius,” “creative soul,” “visionary.” It’s as if we can only see artists through their work, like they’re just vessels for something that passes through them rather than people who make deliberate choices under specific pressures. English gives us precise language for analyzing finished products but vague, mystical language for describing the person in the moment of making. Maybe that’s because creation is inherently contradictory: it’s both intensely controlled (every brushstroke is a decision) and wildly unpredictable (the brush snaps, the paint lands where it wasn’t meant to). The artist isn’t the person who makes perfect things; they’re the person who decides what to do when perfection fails.

This week’s essay prompt: “Write a description with the title, ‘The artist’.”; it’s question 3 from Variant 2 of the May 2025 Paper 2 series.

Here’s what makes this prompt deceptively open: it could be about any kind of artist—painter, musician, writer, dancer—which means students will scatter in a dozen directions. But the real challenge isn’t choosing which type of artist; it’s understanding that “the artist” isn’t asking you to describe what they make, but rather who they are in the act of making.

Most responses will catalog external details—paint-splattered clothes, cluttered studios, focused expressions—but the strongest work understands that an artist is defined by their relationship to their medium, their choices under pressure, and what they sacrifice or preserve in the process.

Can you show us someone wrestling with the gap between vision and execution?

Can you capture the specific texture of creative doubt, or the moment when accident becomes intention?

This is where descriptive writing transcends mere observation: you’re not just painting a portrait of a person—you’re revealing the invisible architecture of how someone transforms raw material (paint, words, sound) into meaning, and what that transformation costs them.

You’ll find the essay here!

 Write a description with the title, ‘The artist’.

The full essay is available for our premium members and is also marked and graded. By reading it, you can get a clear picture of what works, as always. If you haven’t signed up already, then make sure to sign up over here!

Thank you all, and look forward to seeing you in the next one!

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