THE PLAN OR OUTLINE OF YOUR ESSAY
THE PLAN OR OUTLINE OF YOUR ESSAY
So, you have got all of your quotes, primary legislation and cases that you are going to use in your essay. You have a central argument and contention in place and are nearly ready to start writing. Now comes the outlining stage.
This is known as ‘planning’ and it will determine whether your essay will flow nicely and make sense to the reader, or whether it will be a juxtaposition of bad points. At this stage, your research notes have a good amount of useful information and authorities that you will be relying on, but it is all over the place. Here is how to make sense of it all:
Open a separate word document, and start outlining a general structure for your essay. Pull this up next to your page of research notes, which should contain not only the sources and authorities you plan to use, but also your general arguments you plan to make for each section of the essay.
Your ultimate goal here is to fuse the outline with your notes and citations in a way that it flows nicely and you can refer to it effortlessly when you write your essay.
The key to doing this is simplicity. Even before you start thinking about which quotes go where, have an idea of the general direction of where the essay is headed. You should have a good idea of where your discussion is headed from what you’ve gathered in your research and knowledge of the subject area. For example, if we were writing a plan for an essay which answers a question comparing the law on unfair dismissal (UD) and wrongful dismissal (WD), it would look something like this:
Question
To what extent is it true to state that the law on unfair dismissal has rendered the common law action for wrongful dismissal effectively redundant?
The plan
Introduction
This paper seeks to bring a fresh understanding of a hidden rationale which can be seen to encapsulate the judicial approach to dismissal and the judicial approach to termination. This paper in order to answer the question will discuss the following:
What is the difference between UD and WD
UD is a test is the reasonableness and WD is a test of breach of contract
Different concepts.
Is there any overlap
Different types of claimants
o Weatherspoon employee dismissed for making TikTok videos
o The Chelsea Football Manager
6. When are the claims brought in tandem and when are they brought separately?
o The employee at Weatherspoon’s - One claim is dependent on the other
o The Chelsea Football Manager - Example of Jose leaving Chelsea
7. Both are distinct claims where one should not have a bearing on the other
8. Has UD rendered WD obsolete or redundant?
o What do stats say on the number of UD and WD Claims?
o Other factors
The law on WD is clear
Settlements
ACAS
Legal costs
ET1 Form
9. The courts not extending the WD principle
10.Conclusion
Incorporate notes in the plan
Furthermore, if you already have a general idea about where in your outline any particular cases, legislation, academic sources, or examples will be discussed, then make sure to note this down briefly in your outline. This will help make clear how and when the rest of your sources pertaining to that point will be used in your argument.
The outline
Once you have an outline written, you will want to go through and look at your outline more closely; in particular at the headings and bullet points you have used to denote each category of your essay. Do any seem repetitive or redundant? Can any be grouped together in a way that makes them more concise? Or are they better served being kept as separate bullet points so that they can be used for deeper individual discussion? Your goal at this stage is to make sure your outline is concise enough for you to access and understand clearly, and streamlined in a way that your general argument can flow from each point using the research notes you have gathered.
Next, you are going to group your notes around these points and arguments. This will form a substantial part of the main body of your essay. Review all of your research notes that you have written and allocate the different sections of them to the relevant areas and categories in your essay plan. Imagine that your essay outline is a big filing cabinet, and each section of your outline represents a labelled drawer. With each set of notes and citations you have from your research, ask yourself “If I were to file this away in a drawer, which drawer would it go in?” A good way to do this is to sort the essay around each heading and cut and paste the notes (and your commentary on the relevant authorities and quotes) into each section where you feel it leads to relevant discussion. Do not be afraid to repeat a source or authority in more than one area of your plan as well, as long as it is relevant to the discussion in that particular section of your essay.
Therefore, through this process, we begin to collate the sources that we will use in our discussion. For academic articles and citations, put the author, title and citation of the source first, and then just underneath write their main argument and/or the quote that you plan to use, along with the page or paragraph where this quote is found in the text.
Whilst you are sorting the different sections and sources of your research notes into their relevant place in the outline, keep an eye out for common themes, discussions, counterarguments, and parallels, both in relation to your own arguments as well as between the sources themselves. These patterns can alert you to where you can place these sources in the plan in a way that will lead to a constructive discussion in your essay.
Likewise, keep an eye out for categories, sources, and points that do not appear to relate to your argument anymore. Individual pieces of information that first appeared to be significant might become irrelevant as your argument develops, or when gathered together into a broader category.
You will want to do this for each argument you make in your essay, along with how the counterarguments flow from them, and along with the relevant sources that you will use. This way, when you write your essay, you can refer to your extensive, ordered plan in a way that feels natural and in a way that you can cite easily. When placing your research notes into your outline to create your plan, include the page number and full citation for each quote and argument you use from other academic sources, as well as case citations and paragraph numbers where applicable. This is so that you can write straight from the plan, rather than jumping between word documents to try and hunt for citations (so there will not be any of “now where did I find that quote from again?...”). It takes considerably longer to do your essay plan in this way, rather than simply the skeleton outline structure on its own, but put in the extra work now, construct a dense and detailed plan, and the essay will practically write itself.
Using quotes
These notes and portions of quotes with your own summaries and commentary also act as segments from which you can ‘leap’ to your next point, citation or argument (see ‘transitions’ below). It is your job in writing the essay to make sure that these arguments, themes and concepts flow together seamlessly. This can be accomplished in several ways: Signposting, nestling, summarizing, and transitions.
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