2nd and 3rd years...

Yes 2 weeks is a good timescale if you want to do it well.

I would probably spend about 5-6 days hardcore reading. While I was reading I'd create a Word document noting all the useful points as I went through the book, just by writing one line, and then the page reference and book that it came from. So I'd be going through a book by Kavanagh, say and be putting stuff like "KAV p145-6 Thatcher efforts to shrink state stymied by high unemp. and rising welf. bill". Then when I'd gone through all the books I wanted to read, I cut-pasted those points in the word document in order by general point so I knew all the themes I was going to mention in the essay. Usually I reached this point about a week before hand in date. So I'd make a rough plan of what my conclusion and argument of the essay would be, just writing out a summary of the points I wanted to make, and at this point usually I'd try and go and see the tutor in the office hours to ask if I could 'discuss' the essay, ie I'd basically go and verbally outline my argument and see what he/she reckoned, usually they would start asking questions about each point I'd raised, so I'd then use all of their questions in my essays as the counterarguments, to critique them. Sometimes the tutors would pick me up on something and say "look you've only got 3000 words so you don't have time to start talking about this, focus on that instead". Sometimes if it was the holidays and I couldn't go in to see the tutor I'd just email them a general summary of my argument in bullet proof form and ask if it was on the right lines or if there were important issues for consideration that I needed to include. Generally I found all the tutors were very supportive if you contacted them in advance of the deadline because they can see you are motivated and doing the reading and they would basically tell you whether you had the important issues covered, some times I got extra brownie points because a tutor would say stuff like "if you're looking at issue x, try getting such and such a book, or read a particular journal article"

The writing I would probably do in the last few nights. If the essay was due in Monday and it was 3000 words, I'd write the introduction on the Friday night and maybe the first paragraph of the main body of the essay. Then Saturday I'd make sure I was up to about 2000 words. Then Sunday I'd finish it off. I was always writing some of it on the last night but never felt that pressured because by this point I knew what I was doing.