One of the best ways to organize your thoughts is to make a plan. This skill is necessary for everyone, in particular, schoolchildren. During their studies, children very often plan a paragraph, essay, etc.
Why do I need to be able to plan a text?
If you want to write a good essay, speech, novel, or simple essay, you need to make a plan first. Without this important stage, the final text will be chaotic, not well thought out, and the main idea will “wander in circles”. How to make a plan? How to reflect the structure of the plan in the text? Read about it in our article.
Working on an essay: stages
Before you start making a plan for an essay, you need to understand the whole sequence of work. First of all, you need to think about the topic of the future text, decide on its main idea. Next, you need to select the material: statements, quotes, decide on the theses. Writing an essay plan can begin after you know exactly what you want to say in your text. Next, consider the introduction and conclusion. Drawing up a plan for the main parttext is just as important as working on the overall plan. Now you can go directly to writing an essay.
Composition plan: what is it?
Let's look at how to properly prepare for writing an essay. In general, drawing up a plan involves highlighting individual items. It is necessary to identify the key ideas of the finished text or the one that you plan to write. Here the plan of a poem or story is no different from the plan of an essay.
What does it mean to make an essay plan? This means breaking the text into certain fragments, while highlighting the paths along which your thought will develop. Each of the resulting fragments is a microtext, which will be equal to one paragraph or several. Each such microtext must be titled. And the title, in turn, is one of the points of the plan.
How to make a plan?
It is important that the entire text is united by one thought, and the selected fragments are logically connected. The result should be a text, in the structure of which one can distinguish the introduction, the main part and the conclusion.
How to draw up a plan and what to include in its points? As a rule, not individual words, but whole phrases and extended phrases act as points. It is very difficult to convey the main theme or idea in separate words, they are too specific and “narrow”. However, complex sentences are also of little use, since they represent a complete thought: everything that they wanted to say has already been said.
How to make a plan? Use phrases as points, because they carry information in an abbreviated, folded form, while representing a semantic unity. In the essay itself, this idea will need to be “expanded”. However, it is possible to formulate points in the form of questions, the answers to which you will give in the text.
What is important to remember when making a plan?
While working, you should not forget that the plan drawn up earlier carries information about the structure of your essay. It contains specific information about the content of each semantic part of the text. That is, the whole essay should be “viewed” through the plan.
Getting Started: Essay Structure
When making a plan, you need to consider the direction of the thought that you are going to reflect in the essay. What will you start with? What will you finish? What will you write about in the main part? Any text consists of three main parts: introduction, body and conclusion. Choose a heading for each. You can supplement them with your notes-explanations. This way you will get a detailed composition plan, according to which it will be much easier to write the text without losing the logical connection between the parts. You can formulate the points of the plan in the form of questions that you will answer in the essay.
Remember that all three parts of the text will be unequal in size. Also, don't let any of them "fall out".
And what to write in each part of the essay?
- Intro. The introduction is the anticipation of the main idea of the text. It seems to "advertise" it, trying to interest the reader. The introduction prepares for the perception of the main idea, and also sets the tone for the entire text. In this part of the essay, you can give interesting aphorisms or express your emotions.
- The main part. This section should reveal the thought you want to express.
- Conclusion. In this part, you need to summarize what you said in the essay. Remember that the text should not end abruptly. Briefly repeat the main thesis, draw a conclusion.
Composition plan: example
Let's give a sample plan for an essay-reasoning. For example, you need to write a text on the topic “What is friendship?” In this topic, you can speculate about what a friend is, or talk about your own friendship and prove that this is a friendship.
The plan for a story or reasoning is built according to the following scheme:
- Intro. In this part of the essay, we prepare the reader for what we will discuss in the text. You can say that friendship is an important part of our life, or give an interesting statement of a famous person and express your agreement or disagreement, further substantiating it.
- The main part. Here it is necessary to give arguments proving what you said at the beginning. For example, to justify why friendship plays an important role in a person's life. If you agreed or disagreed with the statement about friendship, you need to reasonably explain why you have the same opinion or whythink otherwise.
- Conclusion. Summarize your arguments, draw a conclusion.
Making a plan: tips and tricks
- Drawing up any plan begins with understanding the topic and answering the question of what I want to say in my essay. How to connect it logically?
- First, on a draft, sketch out the main theses that should be reflected in your text.
- Don't be afraid to use supporting materials. This does not mean that you can simply write off everything from the Internet. But it is not forbidden to look at versions of other people's essays on a similar topic and take note of some ideas.
- Remember that not all of the material will be reflected in your work: choose the most interesting and important.
- First of all, remember that the compositional structure of the composition must obey its content.
- The thoughtfulness of a pre-drawn plan determines such important things as the sequence of presentation of thoughts in the text and the logical connection between its parts.
- The proportionality of the parts of the essay is also important: the total volume of the introduction and conclusion should not exceed a third of the volume of the entire text.
- When making a plan, use short and simple sentences. Express your thoughts to the point. It is not necessary that the language be perfect when creating a plan, the main thing is that the paragraphs accurately reflect your point of view.
