Collecting material

 Collecting materials: 

(i) Reading up the Subject :-

                                      When you have got a clear idea of your subject, the next step will be to think of what you can say about it. Some subjects are so simple that a little reflection should supply you with sufficient material for a short essay; but for others, special information will be needed for which you may have to do some special reading. For instance, if you have to write about some historical subjects, or give a description of some country you have seen, you will have to get hold of some book and read the subject up. But in any case, you have to collect materials for your essay before you can write it.

 In schools, class-discussions on the subject, under the guidance of the teacher, are very helpful in this stage of special preparation. In any case, do not attempt to write the essay before you have given some time to thinking over what you can say on the subject. The common habit of beginning to write down the first thing that comes into one's head, without knowing what is to come next, is fatal to good essaywriting.

   

(ii) Collection:

                        As you think over the subject, ideas, facts, and illustrations will pass through your mind. But if you don't catch them as they come, you may forget them just when you want them. So, as you catch birds and put them in a cage, catch and cage these fleeting thoughts by jotting them down on a piece of paper just as they come into your head, without troubling yourself at this stage about their order or suitability. You can examine the birds thus causht at vour leisure later. (To save time afterwards, and for convenience of reference, number these notes as you jot them down.)  

(iii) Selection: 

                        When you think you have collected enough material for your essay, or you can't think of any more points, read over the notes you have jotted down to select the points most suitable for your purpose. Examine at your leisure the birds in the cage, to see what they are worth. You may find that some points are not very relevant or won't fit in; cross them out. You may find that some are mere repetitions of others; and others may be simply illustrations to be brought under main heads. This process of selection will probably suggest to you in a general way the line of thought you may follow in the essay.  

 Logical Arrangement:

                                               Now you should be ready to decide on the line of thought of the essay, i.e., the logical order in which you can arrange the points you have selected. The necessity of thus arranging your thoughts according to some ordinary plan cannot be too strongly insisted upon. Without it, the essay will probably be badly arranged, rambling, disproportioned, and full of repetitions and irrel-evancies. 

 

(i) Making the outline: 

                                     Bearing your subject definitely in your mind and with your purpose clearly before you, sketch out a bare outline of the main heads, under which you will arrange your various materials in a natural, logical and convincing order - from a brief Introduction to an effective Conclusion. 

 

(ii) Filling in the Outline:

                                         Having thus mapped out the main points with which you are going to deal, arrange the ideas you have collected each under its proper main head, rejecting all those not really relevant to your subject or which simply repeat other thoughts, and taking care that each really belongs to the division in which you place it. You will now have a full outline, which is to be a guide to you in writing the essay. But this is not the essay, but only its well-articulated skeleton. You must now clothe the skeleton with flesh, and (most difficult of all) breathe into it the breath of life, before you can call your production an essay. 

EXAMPLE 

       To illustrate this method of collecting materials and drawing up an outline, let us work out together a simple example for an essay on, say, "The Elephant."  

The subject is so simple, that we need not spend any time defining it. What is wanted is evidently a Descriptive Essay, and all we have to do is to think of all we can say about the Elephant.

  

So we can set to work at once catching and caging our birds, or, in other words, jotting down, as they come into our mind, all we can remember about elephants. The thoughts may come to us something like this, and we will put them down and number them as they occur to us.