SKILLS

Overview of our key essay writing skills

There is no single correct structure or approach to writing a good essay. Brilliant essays can be written in many different ways. However, to prevent you from receiving mixed messages from different teachers over your years in school, we have decided on a particular approach based on a selection of key skills which we teach from Year 7 through to Year 11.

Basic skills (Year 7 onwards)

  1. Writing paragraph points. This is the beginning of any piece of analytical writing. You need a point which addresses the question and sets out the argument for the paragraph to come.
    Read the guide

  2. Identifying relevant, meaningful evidence. You need to be able to identify evidence that is relevant to the question (and to your argument) and which is sufficiently meaningful that you can analyse it in detail. Poor evidence leads to poor analysis and, therefore, poor marks.
    Read the guide

  3. Embedding and contextualising evidence. You need to be able to take short quotations from a text and include them in your essay, and you need put them in context so they make sense. Embedding and contextualising quotations allows you to make your references consistently precise, and it allows you to explain what’s going on in the wider text around the quotations too.
    Read the first guide in the 2-part series

  4. Explaining evidence. Once you’ve included your evidence you need to explain it in order to make it clear. What does the evidence mean? What does it tell us about the characters/ideas in the text? How does it help to prove your point? Can you explain the reasoning behind your inferences?
    Read the guide

Intermediate skills (Year 8 onwards)

  1. Analysing language, form and structure. You need be sensitive to the nuance of language, understanding how the different methods writers use add extra, often subtle, meaning to a text. You need to be able to say what the extra meaning is and why the specific method adds that meaning, using correct terminology.
    Read the first guide in the 4-part series

  2. Explaining big ideas and context. You need to be able to link your discussion of a literary text to real people and the real world. What does the text tell us about abstract ideas? What does it tell us about what it means to be human? Can you connect the text to the context in which it was written and received? This is essential for reaching the top grades at GCSE.
    Read the first guide in the 2-part series

Advanced skills (Year 9 onwards)

  1. Creating a conceptualised response. To write a truly outstanding essay, you need to be able to make a single unified argument the essay. This means you need to have what is called a ‘thesis’. Each paragraph then needs to elaborate on a different aspect of that thesis, creating what the exam board call a ‘conceptualised response’.
    Read the guide