Audrey goes to the third floor of her library where the books she needs are located and makes her selections. While she is doing so other potentially useful and relevant titles catch her eye and, by the time she has completed her search, she has eleven books relevant to her topic including many by scholars she knows from the class lectures are recognised experts in the field.
Audrey signs out the eleven books, stuffs as many as she can into her backpack, precariously balances the remaining ones in her arms, catches the bus back to her flat, and drops the books onto her desk.
She then begins to read, making notes as she goes. Some student writers use index cards at this point in the process, since using cards forces the researcher to make clear, concise notes. Audrey simply uses a separate notebook. She carefully begins with all of the relevant bibliographical information—full title, author’s complete name, place of publication, date of publication. She is careful to put page numbers after the notes she makes. There is nothing more frustrating than returning a borrowed book to the library then having to go and find it again, after discovering you need it for a page number or an author’s first name you forgot to include during the note-taking phase. Carefully write down all of the information that must appear in your source list at the end of the essay to avoid this inconvenience.
As she works, Audrey is careful to limit her notes to information clearly relevant to her topic and, in so doing, she is beginning to formulate a plan, a structure for her essay.
Tutorial
Progress questions
1 1 When should you do your research for an academic essay you must write?
2 2 What is a call number?
Discussion points
1 1 What are the advantages and disadvantages of searching for information on the internet?
2 2 What advantages do journal articles have over books? Do books have over journal articles?
Practical assignment
1 1 Find the call number of a book written by one of your professors.
2 2 Find the titles of three journals which should contain information relevant to your course of study.
3 3 Find a website which should contain information relevant to your course of study
Study and revision tip
1 1 Check your textbooks for bibliographies, lists of additional readings, lists of related readings, and references. You can often find titles relevant to your area of interest, and your research will be easier if you have to look for a specific book or journal title.
3 Making a Plan
One-minute overview: A plan is a point-form summary of the main ideas and supporting ideas you want to include in your essay. A plan sometimes uses a system of numbers and letters to indicate what points are main ideas and what points are supporting ideas. Planning is an important part of the writing process. In this book, planning follows thinking and researching as steps in the writing process, and, indeed, most writers probably do most of their planning at this point. But planning really begins when you annotate your assignment sheet and choose a topic, and it continues while you write and revise your essay. Always remember that planning an academic essay is an ongoing process, not a single step along the road to the production of a text. In this Chapter, you will learn about possible ways of planning an essay in the four modes in which academic essays are generally written:
Planning an informative essay
Planning a compare/contrast essay
Planning a persuasive essay
Planning an informative essay
The key to planning an informative essay lies in the way in which the topic is framed. If you are asked to describe a process, your plan will likely highlight the stages of that process. If you are asked to define a concept, your plan will likely highlight the elements of the definition and/or the examples you plan to use to illustrate the concept. If you are asked to analyse something, a poem, for example, your plan will likely highlight those features (form, theme, metaphor) of the poem you wish to discuss.
Your plan can be detailed or sketchy. You can use a system of numbers and letters to indicate titles and subtitles or simple dashes and indentations. Your plan is made of clay, not granite. You will likely want to massage it throughout the writing process to change it as you discover new insights into and new information about your topic.
Suppose, for example, you are to write an essay briefly tracing the history of the English language. Such a topic would pre-suppose a chronological plan:
| Title: English: The First One Thousand Years | ||
| Thesis: Since its beginnings a thousand years ago, English has evolved and changed under the influence of a variety of social and historical forces. | ||
| I. | Old English | |
| A | The influence of the Angles and the Saxons | |
| B | The Celtic influence | |
| C | The Vikings | |
| D | Old English Literature | |
| II. | Middle English | |
| A | The Norman Conquest | |
| B | Chaucer | |
| C | The printing press | |
| III. | Modern English | |
| A | William Shakespeare | |
| B | The King James Version of the Bible | |
| C | The Discovery of the New World | |
| Conclusion: English continues to evolve and change under the influence of technical innovations and a shrinking world. |
With a plan such as this, your transition to paragraphing is facilitated because you can concentrate less on where the paragraph will go and more on how it will read, at least in its first draft. Here, for example, are drafts of the paragraphs that would follow from Part I, sections A and B of the above plan.
Old English is a Germanic language, born in the wake of the invasion of England by German Tribes, most notably, the Angles and the Saxons, during the fifth century. “England,” in fact, is a derivation of “Angleland.” Their language was a branch of Indo-European, which dates back to about 5000 B. C. and from which modern European and even some Asian languages developed.
When the Angles and the Saxons landed on English shores, they were met by an even earlier group of Indo-Europeans, the Celts, whom they forced north and west, where today live Celtic descendants, the Welsh, Scots, and Irish. The Celts were no strangers to invaders, having been victims of Roman imperialism from 55 B.C. to the early part of the fifth century, when the mighty Roman Empire began to collapse. Some English place names, Manchester and Winchester, for example, are derived from the Roman word “castra,” meaning “camp. ”
The