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Get Critical .....Before Writing
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A lot of work needs to go into your essay well before you start typing or writing your first draft. A good estimate is that 40% of your time should be invested in the pre-writing stage.
Now that you have a good understanding of the essay task and you have found some quality academic journal articles and texts, the next step is start actively and critically reading these well selected sources, and take notes in order to start building your essay plan.
During this stage, you will need to go back and forth many times between finding more information, reading and slotting main ideas and supporting details in your plan. In addition, you will need to continue to think critically about the topic and task, synthesise information across sources, organise and reorganise ideas in order to build a solid essay plan. It is not a unidirectional process. There is a lot of going back and forth, so that you achieve a detailed plan from which you can write your first draft.