The essay could be the most common form of prose. It is also simple to read and it is used in schools as a tool in measuring students knowledge, learning and skills. Because it is easy to read, it could be confused by readers as easy to write. Writing this common prose form is not that easy. You need to define your plan and purpose, lay out a plan on how to carry out the process of completing your writing and actually following your plan.

• Visualising a Plan and Purpose – To be able to write an essay, you should start with defining your plan and the purpose for which you are writing for. The top purpose is for school, followed by personal use like for social networking and for income like freelance writing and publication contribution. Thus, the first thing you should do in your writing process or procedure is knowing your writing purpose. Together with this, you should also visualise what plan or approach you want to use. In other words, you should start with what you want to end with. Start with defining your purpose and imagining how you will or want to accomplish your purpose. This is goal setting and visualisation.
• Lay Out the Plan – After setting your goal for your essay writing and having an idea how to achieve it, you can proceed with laying out a concrete and detailed plan representing your goal and vision. Know the deadline on which you need to submit your finished product. It could be the deadline of a contest, contribution submission or the one set by your professor. Give a few days cushion before the deadline and make this date your personal deadline. The cushion will allow adjustments for untoward incidents. Make sure to avoid being overconfident that you have put up cushion time or else its purpose will be defeated. Plot the different component tasks like researching, draft writing, proofreading and final copy writing.
• Carry Out the Plan – Your plan will be useless if you will not follow it. You should be self-disciplined enough so that you can abide to your timetable. Each component task of your writing process is important. For example, if you have planned to give one week for researching, another week for writing the draft and another week for editing, proofreading and writing the final copy, then you should follow this timetable. To be able to do this, you should achieve 20% of the total component task in your first sitting. Also, at the start of sitting down for a task, you should make the first 30 minutes count. This means you should concentrate on your task the first minute you sit down for it. Then, you should sustain this focus for the next 29 minutes, at least.