Tip - Using an essay plan

OK guys (I use this as a gender neutral term), I think I have bothered you enough today, so this is the last thought for the day, this tip is too good to leave until tomorrow!  

For those of you still coming to terms with putting an assignment together, an essay plan may be your answer.  However, before getting to that, first have a read through the Steve's Automotive assignment to get a feel for the standard of presentation required, how the assignment is put together, and how references have been incorporated within the paragraphs.  

To make life easy, it is useful to develop a template for your assignment. For example, all our units require a title page, abstract, table of contents, introduction, conclusion, and list of references (please note that the numerical based units may differ).  This means you can insert all these into the assignment template as shown in Steve's Automotive and then essentially fill in the blanks for each specific assignment - this is a big time saver.  

But now back to developing an essay plan...  

Trying to get all the relevant details into the word count is always difficult. I find that the most effective and efficient means of writing an assignment is to use an essay plan. Briefly this means:  

1. First write down the main issues that address the question - these often become the main headings. This is the most important step because the question must be clearly understood so that you do not get side-tracked.  

2. Then by using point form and some key words under these 'headings' you will begin to work out if subheadings are required, or if the point form and keywords should be the topic sentences in paragraphs.  

3. At this stage, with the headings, subheadings and topic sentences in place (in point form) it is worth looking at how this will fit the word count, the number of words can be calculated roughly for each heading, this will give you a good idea of how brief or comprehensive each issue will need to be. Importantly it helps you to become a more efficient writer, because you know if you write more under one heading then you will have to write less under another heading.  

4. After the framework of the assignment has been developed it is a matter of inserting more detail and the necessary references to support and justify discussion.  

I encourage you to try this method, it will help to save time.  Unfortunately some students see this as time wasting preferring to launch directly into writing - this is why students are then faced with the difficult task of removing excess words or inserting unnecessary detail that is not relevant to the question.

I also encourage students to begin this planning process from week one of the semester and add a bit to the plan each week, this way, when the assignment due date is closing in, quite a bit of the work will have been done.  

Remember that examiners are looking to check if the most relevant issues have been discussed. We know when we set an assignment/exam that everything can not be addressed, but this is part of the test, we are looking to see what detail each student is prioritising, that is, what justification is being used to support why those particular issues are being raised.  

Of course, some students prefer to be adrenaline junkies and put in the "all-nighter" the night before the assignment is due, this is one approach I do not recommend (but did at times when I was a student)!  

Cheers  

Stephen