Fail to plan, plan to fail.
I cannot emphasise enough how important it is to *plan longer responses before you begin writing*.
Students sometimes say, almost as though it’s a badge of honour, ‘I never plan, I just make it up as I go along.’ This approach is not advisable, particularly when it comes to the directed writing task on paper 2, which usually involves identifying, assimilating and synthesising ideas across two passages and evaluating various opinions and arguments to arrive at a conclusion.
Examiners look for a strong sense of structure and sequence in students’ work: is there an overall framework within which clearly expressed ideas are linked together and do they flow one to another? A plan can help you create this coherence and continuity.
A plan can also help you make sense of your thoughts. It can sometimes be the case that, having carefully highlighted and annotated the texts, you can find you’ve ended up with a jumble of ideas you don’t know what to do with. This can be daunting. It’s worth taking a step back to untangle and separate out the individual strands and think about how you can weave elements together to create a seamless finished piece.
How should I plan? A plan should be simple and can be a series of bullet points, a word cloud, spider diagram, mind map – whatever works for you, it’s wise to think through your thoughts, organising and imposing some kind of order on them. The idea is that you have a kind of flexible roadmap, which you can refer back to when writing, to keep you on track and ensure you don’t lose sight of where you’re heading or go off the rails completely (!) and end up at an unintended destination!
One last thing to mention is that students sometimes feel planning takes up too much time, however, even a very brief plan is time well spent.
Trust me, you can always tell a carefully thought out response from one that isn’t.
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