Planning Your Essay

You guys are welcome back. In today’s lecture we’re going to talk about planning planning your essay an absolutely essential part of the process of writing your essay in eilts writing task 2. Why is it so important. While there are a number of reasons why it’s so important. Best of all it can help you to reduce the anxiety you feel makes you feel more confident about how you go about the writing. It can help you to stay focussed on the task requirements so that you get a better score in Taskin shipment helps to save time although it takes time to write a plan. In the long run we’re aiming to actually reduce the amount of time it takes to write the essay. Helps you to think about topic related vocabulary thus boosting your score in lexical resource can help you to organize your thoughts logically and coherently thus boosting your score in coherence and cohesion. It can improve your general sense of coherence. Again boosting that same score it can also boost that cohesion. A third point to make here we will be able to link our ideas much more cohesively if we plan our work. Finally it helps us to spot little errors. Maybe we make an error in the plan but when we come to the writing we will notice that error and be able to correct it. So how do we go about planning. There should be a three part process to planning. Part 1 is to identify the question type. We looked at this two lectures back the different question types. So let’s see if we can do that here. Identify the question types. Some experts believe it is better for children to start learning a foreign language at primary school rather than secondary school. Do the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. Remember the four different question types opinion opinion discussion discussion and situation. Which one do you think this is. Let’s underline the most important language here. Do the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. That is what gives away what type of question we’re looking at which is. A discussion opinion question. So now we know the structure of the essay that we need. The second part of the process of planning is to underline the key words so that we stay focussed on the task requirements. This case I would say that the keywords are better. We’re thinking of comparatives. Whether to start learning a foreign language at primary school rather than secondary school. So better start learning a foreign language. Primary school secondary school. These are the key themes to think about. In an essay like this helps us to stay focussed on those ideas. If we underline them of course our advantages outweigh the disadvantages. Very key part. I trust that you will be able to work out that that is important without underlining it. But we’re underlining it here just to emphasize the point. And you can see all of these keywords here. So this will help us to address all parts of the task which is an absolutely essential criteria point for achieving band seven in task achievement. If you want to score bad day the only thing that changes is the word sufficiently sufficiently addresses all parts of the task will allow you to achieve a bandaid. So basically just properly addressing everything. The final part of the planning process can be done in two different methods and it’s essentially the planning part so the first method looks a little bit like this. You think about your body paragraphs only you do not want to plan the introduction and the conclusion because they shouldn’t need any planning. You should know exactly what you’re going to do. We know we’re going to rephrase the question. We know why our opinion is we’re going to state a plan. You don’t really need to plan that part. You would want to plan their body though. So let’s think about what we want here. Start with the side you disagree with. Maybe you think it is better to start learning a foreign language at primary school. If that’s the case then you can begin by looking at the disadvantages. The opposite side of beginning to learn a foreign language at primary school. So we’ll just quickly do a few notes about what those are still learning a language. It’s too much pressure. Other subjects are more important like maths science and sport. Maybe a bit more support needed there and then we move to the side that we agree with so we can look at the advantages. In this case it’s a critical learning period. The child’s brain is forming connections. The earliest start gives us more vocabulary. Become fluent even more quickly and would lead to a successful future. Again we don’t really need to write a conclusion plan. We know what we’re going to do here. Now this is one method and to be honest I think this is the inferior method. I think there is a superior method for planning. Which we’re going to look at now. And as I said we only want to care about the body paragraphs are going to focus on those in paragraph 1 as before. We’re going to look at the disadvantages but the difference with this kind of plan is that we actually plan every individual sentence. That sounds like it would take a long time but over time with a lot of practice it can be done very quickly. So what we do is we look at each individual sentence and we give it a purpose. Now we’re sort of moving forward a bit too quickly here. If you want to know what these letters stand for in a bit more detail then please go to the coherence and cohesion section of the course and look at building body paragraphs. I’m going to go through this quite quickly here. T essentially is a topic sentence where we just give our main arguments. S is support sentence where we just support the idea. Example for E second supporting sentence here. A second example. Same down below in the second body paragraph. T s s to E2 an R which stands for result what is the result. Essentially what we want Doe is about five sentences for each body paragraph. As I said is when we get to the coherence and cohesion section we’ll be able to look at this in a bit more detail today. Just showing you the basic steps involved in planning your essay part 1 Identify the question type part to highlight the key words and part 3 actually plan the content of your essay. This entire planning process should be completed within 5 minutes to give yourself thirty five minutes for the rest of the essay. Now the next lecture is going to go into a bit more detail about these time guidelines.