Editing and Ordering Your Material

Planning your essays in this way involves routinely working through two quite distinct stages: editing and ordering your material. Neither of them can be rushed: you must work through them carefully and deliberately. Both call for what you might describe as the personality profile of a military planner: inexhaustible supplies of quiet patience matched by cool ruthlessness. There will be ideas, arguments and evidence with which you have developed a strong emotional bond, but you may have to cut them out and abandon them without a tear if the essay is to succeed. However painful it is to realise that some of the material you’ve worked hard to collect is irrelevant to this essay, you cannot shirk the responsibility. If you do, you will pass on problems to later stages and, if they’re not dealt with there, they will seriously weaken the clarity and logical structure of your essay. By the same token, try to avoid the exhaustive answer in which you try to impress your tutor by putting in everything you know. You’re being assessed on your abilities to interpret issues and make a judgement as to what’s relevant to them. Don’t sacrifice this ability for the chance to impress someone with how much you know.