BASIC ARRANGEMENTS FOR TACKLING WAEC/NECO ENGLISH LANGUAGE ESSAYS IN THE CLASSROOM

 The building blocks of an essay long before the actual exams are Words, Sentences and Paragraphs. To plan an essay, the following elements are important.
1.Characters involved: These characters can be human, non-human or both. They can be fictional or as real to life as you want them to be. But they usually have relationships or interrelationships within the composition.
2.Action involved: The characters should do things based on motives.
3.Setting for the composition: this has to do with the time, place(s) of the action or of the event.
4.Climax: In some compositions, it is necessary to describe the actions in such a way that they will lead to conflict or even an event which can be called a climax. This is especially true of short stories.
5.Instances/ Causes/ Effects: In some compositions, what would be required are instances, causes of these instances and their effects.
6.Political/ Social/ Economic/ |Financial: It is always good to remember that the above instances can be influenced to a certain degree by  political, social, economic and financial factors.
7.Pros & Cons: Remember also that the question may ask you to relate the advantages or disadvantages or both as effects arising from the causes mentioned
8.Memory Joggers: when writing an essay and you begin to run out of steam, you can always get back on track if you remember the following: what am I writing about?, who/whom, where and when and how. Remembering nouns, verbs and adjectives relating to the subject matter can also be helpful.
Other Relevant Notes:
9.Essays could be a letter, a speech, a narration, a description, a debate, an argument, a report, an article, an exposition or creative writing.
10. The minimum length ,time and mark allocated are usually as stated in the syllabus of the examination body
11.Students are best advised to choose a topic suitable to their interest i.e. they should be advised to make choices 2months before the exam, and practice a related essay taking the do’s and dont’s to be found later on this forum into consideration. For this purpose, students may regard themselves as letter writers (formal/informal), narrators/ storytellers/authors or journalists ( report/article/exposition) or debaters ( debate/argument). The tutor should divide up the class and use past questions for practice according to their chosen professions.This to be done with a view to  getting each student specialize in two aspects of compositions long before the exam date.
12.Purpose:After reading an essay question either in class or during private study, students should jot down ideas immediately as they occur to them. These ideas would form the floor plan for the essay. The tutor should then mark or judge the essay in terms of the writer’s success in achieving the PURPOSE- be it to entertain, instruct, inform, admonish, persuade or plead.
13.C.O.E.M:Essays are expected to be in relation to -CONTENT, ORGANIZATION, EXPRESSION,MECHANICAL ACCURACY
 Adequacy and treatment of subject matter (content)
Originality  of approach (content)
Balance and paragraph linkages (organization)
Appropriateness of language(expression)
Clarity of exposition or narration in argument (expression)
Avoidance of  spelling and grammatical errors and the  misplacement of punctuation marks(mechanical accuracy)