GCSE essay planning made easy

Mind The GAPS!

Do you ever feel like your essay is a train that gets delayed and takes ages to arrive? Do you ever feel like you don’t know where to go once you’ve started your essay journey? Well, get back on track with this guide to help you plan better essays!

You’re not alone. We’ve all been there: the difficult essay which we wish would write itself… but then we remember the Essay Fairy doesn’t exist! (and even if it did, it probably wouldn’t help us, anyway *sigh*) So looks like we’ll have to do it ourselves once more. Oh well. We’ve done it before so we can do it again.

The problem is so many of us rush into essays because we’re overconfident and can’t be bothered to plan. Just remember: laziness is craziness! Taking a little time out to do a proper plan will make your essay clearer, neater and it will be easier and faster to write.

Once you have read your essay question twice and any text that goes with it (again, twice!), start your essay plan with these four simple letters…

Genre…      what type of text are you studying?
(e.g. Online blog? Horror story? Boring school article?)

Audience…   who is this text written for?
(e.g. Everyone? Teenagers? Teachers? *yawn* Parents? *double-yawn!*)

Purpose…    why has the text been written?
(e.g. Inform? Persuade? Shock? Entertain stupid dads?)

Style…         how has the text been written?
(e.g. 1^st/2^nd/3^rd person? Rhetorical devices? In mum’s embarrassing text language?)

It doesn’t matter if your essay is for English, history or even rocket science - if you can answer these questions, your essay will be much more manageable!

Work out the Genre and you can make great comparisons with other similar and different texts as well as make it clear in your mind what you’re looking at (don’t waste your time going off on irrelevant tangents!)

Identify who the intended Audience of a text is and that can help you think like the writer of the text. If you can think like the writer then you’ll understand more about who they were and who they wanted to write for.

To realise why it was written, identify the Purpose of the text. This will tell you why the author chose to write it and what they were hoping to achieve. You can then judge how successful they were.

And finally, have a look to see if you can find any particular Styles the text has. These can be anything to do with how the author wrote it so focus on its layout, choice of words or even how much punctuation or many pictures are included! Many different things change the way a text is written including all of what has been mentioned above and also when and where it was written. It can be difficult to decide what styles to focus on so read carefully and decide which things you’re going to focus on.

After all this, you can start thinking about your introduction, conclusion and whatever good stuff comes in between. Don’t forget to plug the GAPS in your head and let the good stuff flow!

By Edmund Cox