An Essay Plan Example - A Detailed Guide to Write a Perfect Essay
Planning the logical structure and argument coherence of the essay before writing makes it more likely to organise your ideas better. As a result,...
Planning the logical structure and argument coherence of the essay before writing makes it more likely to organise your ideas better. As a result, you might end up writing an essay with a logical argument and stay on the topic. A perfect essay plan gives you an outline which provides detailed guidelines on which ideas should be explained under which heading. This will give clarity of thoughts and a clear roadmap for completing the essay.
Everything apart, crafting a perfect essay plan is itself a challenge. Students get confused about what to plan before and what will be decided during further research and the writing process. Students often seek examples of essay plans to get an idea of what an essay plan looks like and what experts include in their plans for essay writing.
Our essay writing experts at The Academic Papers UK have compiled this article to solve this mystery for students. This guide will provide valuable insights, discuss essay plan examples, and provide a complete outline for your essay.
Continue reading this guide, which will enable you to outline your essay comprehensively.
Essay Plan Example and Argument Hierarchy
The common essay outline includes an introduction to the main idea of your topic, the argument statement, three to five body paragraphs and a conclusion to sum up the thoughts. Every body paragraph will contain a separate idea, which will be argumentatively connected.
This article will discuss the essay plan for a sample topic: “How Smoking Affects Our Blood, Heart, Lungs, and Nervous System.” We will provide advice on which themes to cover in which body paragraphs and how the introduction and conclusion will coherently cover all four ideas.
Here is the essay plan example to demonstrate the process and best practices for writing an essay with a coherent argument and clarity of thoughts. So, without any ado, let’s explore what this sample essay has for you to take away.
Essay Question/Topic
The essay question must serve the purpose of students writing something interesting and requires a deep analysis of the area. The essay topic must be simple enough to cover. Your choice of topic will define the quality of your essay and how impressed your professor will be.
For our sample essay plan example, we have selected the following topic: “Discuss the multifaceted effects of smoking on the human body, particularly on cardiovascular, respiratory, and nervous systems. Also, analyse the mechanism through which smoking cast bad impacts on human health” This topic will be effective, concise, and impactful to cover in your essay.
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Introduction to the Essay
The introduction of the essay has to be intriguing and compel the reader to continue reading. If the audience does not read your essay completely, this would be considered a failure of your argument and introduction of the essay.
An interesting introduction will not only keep the reader reading the essay but also convey the main theme and idea of the document. You can ask intriguing questions, add statistics, or quote interesting or controversial facts about the topic.
Here is the sample essay introduction: “As per the latest research, the cancers caused by smoking are the major causes of preventable deaths in the UK. According to Cancer Research UK, around 80,000 die every year due to cancers caused by Isoprene, PAH and others.”
This will give a good start to your essay for the assigned topic, inspire the reader to continue and give an indication of the quality of research they are going to read in an essay.
After giving a good start, you need to continue the argument by discussing the types of cancers caused by smoking. You can also highlight which carcinogens are found in tobacco and how they cause cancer. Towards the end of the introduction, you can introduce your argument statement to build coherence.
Thesis Statement of the Essay
The thesis statement should set the reader's expectations from the essay and give an idea of what’s coming next. It will not only introduce the topic but also work as a connection between the introduction and the first body paragraph.
Here is the sample thesis statement for the smoking topic: “This essay analyses and discusses the varied impacts of smoking on human health, especially on the cardiovascular, respiratory, and nervous systems of the individuals”.
This thesis statement clearly indicates what you are thinking of explaining throughout the essay and sets the expectations for the reader.
Body of the Essay
The most difficult and important thing is maintaining the coherence of the argument in the body paragraphs. To solve this issue, there are four elements referred to as “SEXI Structure” This essay structure is often used to build the argument of the essay through the body paragraphs. This indicates what idea you need to discuss first and which will follow that one.
Here is the overview of the SEXI Structure of your body paragraphs.
S: An S represents the topic sentence, which means you need to write the jist of a topic sentence for each paragraph in your essay plan example.
E: Complete Explanation of the topic you are going to discuss in the particular paragraph. There can be several different aspects of the information you are going to discuss in the first paragraph of your essay; you can also add this to your essay plan as you might get confused between plenty of information available.
X: the examples to back your essay or provide justifications for the arguments quoted throughout the essay must be provided in each paragraph.
I: The importance of the argument and explaining the topic in context. And also how significant the topic for your essay is.
Body Paragraph #1 for the Essay Plan
In the first body paragraph of your essay, you can discuss the effects of smoking on cardiovascular systems, where you can use the SEXI structure for the first paragraph by presenting the topic sentence first. After that, you can explain the topic further and back those explanations with proper examples. Towards the end, you can highlight the importance of that paragraph for the essay in your essay plan.
For planning, you can write your first paragraph by covering this information: “The presence of tar and other dangerous chemicals in tobacco smoke can damage the heart and blood vessels of your heart, resulting in thick blood and higher risk of blood clots. Smoking is also a major cause of Coronary heart disease (CHD), stroke, and blood flow to the heart and brain.”
After providing this information, you can further explain how these issues are harmful to human health and how they are caused by smoking. You also need to conclude the argument of this paragraph towards the end of the passage so it does not continue in the second one.
Body Paragraph #2 for the Essay
The structure of the argument will remain the same for the second paragraph as well. However, you will be discussing the second organ which is affected the most by smoking: the respiratory system. Following the SEXI structure will give a coherent argument for your essay and increase the sense and credibility of the work. Providing evidence or examples will also help the cause.
Here is the Sample essay plan example for your second paragraph: “The major effect of smoking on the respiratory system results in the form of Lung cancer. It also causes COPD, Chronic Bronchitis, Emphysema, and other types of cancers. As we know, the respiratory system is responsible for taking a breath for humans; it becomes extremely difficult for the patients to survive”.
You can mention in your essay plan that you need to explain these concepts further, back them with examples, and describe the importance of the argument in the context of the topic. This way, you will be able to describe the topic comprehensively and conclude the second theme in the second paragraph.
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The third body paragraph will investigate the impacts of smoking on the nervous system of humans. You should introduce the topic of the paragraph first, then explain the topic. You can explain which carcinogens are responsible for damaging the nervous system and causing related diseases.
Here is the sample essay plan example for your reference, “The carcinogen nicotine has various negative impacts on the nervous system of not only the smokers but also the people around them. Nicotine is an addictive element of the smoke and damages the nervous system with diseases like Cognitive decline, Brain metastasis, and Neurotransmitter symptoms. They are the major causes of anxiety, depression, restlessness, and problems in concentration”.
These lines must be followed by further explanation, evidence in support of your essay argument, the significance of the paragraph, and why you chose to cover this in your essay. This will enable you to write the body paragraphs comprehensively and be ready to conclude the argument in the conclusion part.
Conclusion for the Essay
The conclusion of your essay is equally important as the introduction and body paragraphs are. You need to comprehensively sum up all the arguments discussed in the essay, such as the cardiovascular system, respiratory system, and nervous system, respectively. For example, you can touch upon the main theme of all the impacts, such as the carcinogens responsible, how the diseases are caused, etc.
While writing the conclusion, you can also quote some statistics that conclude which parts of the body are highly affected by the elements present in tobacco smoke. One thing you need to take care of is you should never discuss an idea or argument you haven’t discussed in the essay before, which means you can not introduce a new idea to the essay at this stage. However, if you think an idea is worth including in the argument, you can inject it into the above body of the essay first and then cover it in the conclusion.
Introducing a new idea in the essay body after writing it can have risks, such as distracting the argument of the section; you should be careful of that as well.
Other Steps Involved in Creating an Essay Plan
Besides the essay plan example provided in this article, there are certain steps involved in creating a solid essay plan. We have compiled this detailed step-by-step guide to help you create an essay plan that aligns with your topic needs.
So, let’s dig deeper into the details of this procedure of creating an essay plan.
1. Understand the Essay Question
One of the main issues detected in the students’ essays is it does not complement the essay question. The intent does not match, or the students struggle to maintain a relevant and coherent argument. When creating the essay plan, you should completely understand the essay question before you start the actual research process.
2. Brainstorm Ideas
The next step is even more important. You need to brainstorm ideas related to your topic and jot them down. You might get irrelevant or unstructured ideas while brainstorming, so you should not worry about the order of the ideas at all. Just note them on paper or your computer sheet.
You need to gather as many ideas as you can so you can analyse them later and choose the highly relevant and effective ideas for your essay. This way, you will be able to gather a large amount of ideas for your essay and will not have to worry about the lack of data on the topic. Brainstorming allows you to explore all the important and various angles of the topic, so you do not miss out on any.
3. Conduct Preliminary Research
You should conduct the preliminary research, and depending on your topic, you should gather some credible and relevant sources of information and data. You should note down those sources and make brief notes, highlighting the key points you will be including in your essay. This will simplify the writing and research process later on, and you will not have to juggle lots of information.
4. Organise the Arguments
The ideas you have gathered through brainstorming and noted them down, this is the time to analyse them. After careful analysis, you need to categorise and organise the highly relevant and important ideas brainstormed in the earlier stage of the research. This way, you will be able to avoid any duplication of the ideas and ensure you have created a solid argument hierarchy for your essay.
5. Create a Detailed Outline
The final step of your essay plan will be creating a detailed outline that involves everything from the research question to which ideas to discuss in the introduction and in which logical order to use. Creating an outline will also enable you to predetermine the ideas you will be discussing in each body paragraph.
To go to the next level of essay planning, you can plan the argument and order of the ideas within the body paragraphs. You can use the SEXI structure to determine the structure of your paragraphs. You should also determine what you will be covering in the conclusion of your essay based on the arguments discussed above.
Final Thoughts
To conclude this guide, having an essay plan example to give students an idea of the structure and arguments of an essay can be really useful. This can be really valuable if you are struggling to understand how to make an argument hierarchy throughout your academic essay.
In this article, we have provided a thorough and argumentative essay plan example. Using the impacts of smoking as a sample topic, we wrote an essay from the research question to the body paragraphs and conclusion. We have also provided a step-by-step guide to creating an essay plan that meets the unique needs of your topic.
