Deciding which ideas and evidence to use
- Analysing the title
- Collecting all the ideas you have
- Drawing a diagram to show which ideas and evidence to use
- Writing your plan
- Writing your first draft (first try)
- Analysing the first draft
- Feedback on your first draft
- Feed back on the use of language
- Writing final draft
Take the ideas which you think are the most useful and interesting, and decide how you will organise them in a way which will answer the hidden question in the title. You may decide that you do not want to use all the ideas which you collected. Do not forget to think about evidence.
Remember that evidence means details, examples, and facts which you can use to support your ideas and your writing. Look at how Chaohua organised her diagram. First, she decided on the main ideas that she wanted to include in her essay. She didn’t include all the ideas that she first thought of.
She decided that the government wants its citizens to be more international was included in the idea English is the main language internationally. She rejected the point that English is an easy language to learn, as she thought this may not actually be true, and it’s not a strong enough reason. She’s decided that children like learning languages could be included in the idea children learn languages more quickly than adults.
She decided to keep the idea that parents care about their children and want them to succeed in life. Next, she decided to add some details and examples to support her main points. For English is the official language internationally, some examples might be business, politics, and science. And the consequence of this is that more and more people need to learn English for their future jobs, so they need to start young.
For children learn languages more quickly than adults, an example might be that if a child lives in another country, he can learn to speak three or four other languages quickly. For the idea that parents care about their children and want them to succeed, the result would be that they want their children to study hard and learn English at a young age.
So you can see the she’s expanded on her main points and given more examples and details to support those points. Now decide on the main points you want to include in your essay.
Try and reduce this to three main points. These will form the main ideas of each of your paragraphs.
Like Chaohua you may decide to reject some of your ideas or to combine some of the ideas together. Also, start to add some examples and details to support your main points. These will be the content of the main body of each of your paragraphs.
Sometimes you will have more ideas for your essay than you can include. In these situations, you need to choose which ideas to include in your essay to make your essay interesting and ensure it answers the hidden question in the title. Watch the demonstration how to draw a diagram to help choose which ideas to use and how to structure them in your essay.
You might like to use a diagram like this to help you decide which of your ideas to use and how to structure them. You can then use these ideas to develop your essay plan. In the next step you can see how Chaohua planned her essay.