1. Researching

You’ve got your assignment, and now you need to research a response to it. You have the freedom at this point to think about your essay however you like. There are few bad ideas at this stage, though some of your ideas may drop away later on. This is that magical time of free, expansive thinking and research when you need to start deciding what you’re writing about, how you’re going to write about it, which points you intend to make, and the conclusions that you’ll draw on the other side of making them. If you’re an English Literature student, this will mean reading literary texts and, moreover, secondary-critical accounts of them.

I sometimes call this stage ‘doodling’. It’s when you read a lot and think a lot, taking notes without a fully formed sense of where it’s all headed. Write things down haphazardly—what matters is that you write down your ideas somewhere, or that you record them in audio format. Draw a mind map or a spider diagram. Use note-cards. Keep things unpressured. Don’t assume you’ll remember an idea just because you’ve had that idea—as soon as you have it, log it. Sometimes students carry around a small notebook for precisely this purpose. Other students send emails to themselves on the go, logging their ideas in the subject heading or main body of the communication. Trust yourself to forget your good ideas: we only have so much working memory. Far better to store them somewhere as soon as they occur to you. I say this from bitter experience of doing precisely the opposite.

Turning Ideas into an Argument
Doodling alone won’t get you where you need to go. You need to start grouping those ideas into patterns and themes and units. Reading the work of critics—established professionals who have published articles and books on a given topic—helps to give you some bearings, and if you’re at university this will in any case be a required aspect of your assessment. Don’t worry just yet, though, about turning your groups of doodles into proper argumentative sequences. That comes next. For now, focus on finding common areas of emphasis. Make another, more focused mind map. Use a document in which you group ideas into bullet-points or into lists and paragraphs. Do whatever you need to do to find long, provisional lines of consistent response to a given point or idea. Refining everything comes later.

Doodling Time
Don’t work for hours on end. Different students will have different ways of working, but a decently productive stretch of time for good research, in my view, is about an hour. Work for a bit, then take a break. When you’re preparing an essay, good ideas will often pop into your head when you’re not working and doing something else. Allow your mind to switch off a bit. Don’t force matters. Your brain is a muscle and straining it to perform when you need to rest will result in … well … very little. 

The main thing I’ve learned over the years is that often your best ideas will come to you in the writing. Don’t assume that you need to have all your ideas in pristine condition in order to start drafting your essay. Quite the opposite. Many of the best ideas occur once you begin the drafting process, which is itself a mode and method of thinking. Writing and drafting are techniques for generating insight, not the end-products or consequences of it.