Most students who are stuck at a B grade aren't stuck because they can't write. They're stuck because they start writing before they've actually planned an argument — so the essay discovers its point somewhere in paragraph three, instead of arguing it from the first sentence. A five-minute plan, done properly, fixes this. Here's the method, and where it starts to matter for your grade.
Step 1: Build a thesis, not a topic
A topic is "Shakespeare presents jealousy in Othello." A thesis is "Shakespeare presents jealousy as a self-perpetuating structure that consumes its own evidence, rather than an emotion resolved by proof." The difference is that the second one is arguable — someone could disagree with it — and an arguable claim is the only kind that can organise an essay. If your thesis could be the title of a textbook chapter, it isn't specific enough yet.
The test: could a classmate write the opposite thesis and still find evidence for it? If yes, you have an actual argument. If the question only has one obvious answer, you haven't narrowed it enough.
Step 2: Build each paragraph around one piece of evidence doing several jobs
This is where most B-grade paragraphs lose marks — not from a lack of quotations, but from quotations that do only one job (usually just "proving" a point that was already obvious). An A* paragraph asks a single piece of evidence to do at least three things at once: support the thesis, reveal something about technique or form, and connect to a wider context or critical reading.
Page from the A* Essay Planning Guide — the full five-step method.
In practice, this means a good plan doesn't just list quotations under each paragraph. It notes, next to each one, the technique it demonstrates, the effect that technique produces, and the one AO3 or AO5 point it connects to. If you can't fill in all three columns for a quotation, it's probably not strong enough to build a paragraph around — swap it for one that is.
Steps 1 and 2 are the foundation, and they're worth practising on their own before you touch a full essay. But they're only half the method. The other three steps — how to sequence your paragraphs so the argument actually develops rather than repeating itself, how to write a conclusion that extends the thesis instead of just restating it, and the specific self-check questions examiners use when they're deciding between an A and an A* — are where most of the grade jump actually happens.
The full guide also includes two fully worked example plans (a single-text essay and a comparison essay), two printable planning templates you can reuse for any question, and an A* self-assessment checklist to run your own plans against before you write.
If the first two steps changed how you'll plan your next essay, the rest of the method is built to finish the job.