Organising your ideas for a plan
Using spider diagrams
Spider diagrams are useful for recording thoughts and ideas. When you are writing about one text, you may decide to use a spider diagram to jot down your ideas and then order them.
When writing about two texts you need to make links between the points you have identified about each of them. To do this, you could:
- make separate spider diagrams for each text, and then look to link points between them
- make one spider diagram showing each point you make about one text (for example ‘the author directly addresses the audience’), and checking to see if it’s true of the other text too
Using tables
If you like having a neatly written plan, you might try using a table.
Here’s an example:
| Point | Example from text A | Example from text B |
| Use of humour | The pun in the title | Exaggeration about the mother character |
| Description for different purposes | Lots of detail in order to sell the product – we know how great it is | Lots of detail to build up a picture of the family, so we feel sorry for them at the end |
| Point | Use of humour |
|---|---|
| Example from text A | The pun in the title |
| Example from text B | Exaggeration about the mother character |
| Point | Description for different purposes |
|---|---|
| Example from text A | Lots of detail in order to sell the product – we know how great it is |
| Example from text B | Lots of detail to build up a picture of the family, so we feel sorry for them at the end |