Essay Structure advice from a
University of Oxford graduate
It might sound rather a melodramatic claim, but I feel as though I only truly grasped how to plan and
write essays effectively towards the very end of my English degree.
That’s not to say that I couldn’t write essays at all beforehand, but rather that far too much
agonising went on. I’d make elaborate spider diagrams; reams of increasingly unintelligible notes;
complex colour-coded systems. All of these things were helpful (to varying degrees), but the one key
element I was missing was the ability to boil down my argument to a single sentence.
No matter how simplistic or banal this sentence might sound, it really doesn’t matter: it’s a thought
experiment, not a mission statement. Next time you’re wading through a plan or staring at a blank
page, just try it. The sentence itself doesn’t have to be elegantly crafted, or persuasively
forceful: all that can wait. What it does do is focus the mind and force you to remember what
exactly you’re trying to cover and communicate.
There’s another lesson to be learnt from this, which is that is key not to self-edit too much as you
go along. Allow yourself to write a dire paragraph or two – you can always revisit them later. The
enemy of productivity is perfectionism, and it’s far easier to tweak a block of text than it is to
create one from scratch.
I’m certainly not against planning per se; indeed, it’s vital! Just try and be creative and concise
in your approach. Write a few key points on post-it notes so that you can rearrange them later (the
order they come in doesn’t matter quite as much as you’d think). Suggest some ideas out loud to
yourself, just to mix things up. And, above all, take breaks. Do not stare at an empty screen for
hours upon hours waiting for your masterpiece to take shape. Work in short, effective bursts and
reward yourself for your concentration.
Additional resources:
Essay Structure
Essay Structure
Debunked
How
to Structure an English Literature Essay: AS and A-level
Essay Writing
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