Organize Information (Workout E)

Once you have a lot of content to work with, the journey towards an essay becomes a bit like solving a jigsaw puzzle. How will you group and connect all the ideas together? Which ideas will fit into the picture and which ones need to be left out? What exactly is the overall big picture that you are building?

Keeping these questions in mind, you can work on organizing and grouping your ideas, while thinking about the connections between them.

Consider the following essay topic:

Discuss why video games are a useful tool in the primary school classroom.

Once we brainstorm a lot of ideas, we can consider how to organize them. This image shows an attempt to find connections and organize raw ideas for this essay topic.

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Have a look at this more organized version of the ideas for the essay.

Start with the green boxes. We have identified three main ideas about how video games are used in the classroom and elaborated on the benefits of these uses.

The orange box links the three main ideas to the question of why video games are useful and reflects on some conclusions about how video games allow students to actively participate in their learning.

The point about the negative impact of video games increasing screen time remains on the page. Should we include this, or cut it from the essay? This is the type of decision that is made in the organization process.