Success in Academic Writing by Trevor Day

Author:Trevor Day
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan Education UK

6.6 Planning: from large- to small-scale

Planning, always helpful whatever size the communication, becomes even more important when dealing with a large document such as a dissertation. In the case of a dissertation, you can begin creating a plan of your document at an early stage, suggesting likely chapters and their provisional titles and contents. The same approach applies when dealing with a smaller document, such as an essay or practical report, but then you are not dealing with chapters but with sections and parts of them. However, the same general principles apply. The description that follows is for a dissertation, but can be readily scaled down for a smaller assignment.

The overall approach, which draws some parallels with that of Orna and Stevens (2009), is to plan in steps from whole document, to chapter, to section, to subsection, to paragraph. The planning does not all need to be done in one go. Indeed, it is likely that the plan will be built up over time. For a smaller document, such as a practical report, the likely steps are: from report, to section, (perhaps to subsection), and then to paragraph. The process can be conceptualised as planning in steps or layers (see Figure 6.4).

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