This work investigated motivational strategy for improving students’ performance in essay writing in secondary schools in Sokoto State of Nigeria. Essay writing has become a very important part of academic life, even outside academic life most of what is done is communicate and often times in writing. In school a student is assumed to have done well when he or she performs creditably in the English language paper, and what constitutes a mayor part of this paper is writing. It is in this aspect that schools, teachers, parents and examination bodies complain of students ’poor performance. The reasons for this poor performance include poor methods adopted by teachers in the teaching essay writing and lack of motivational strategies among others. This paper sought to find out if using a visual organizer, the tree diagram writing strategy will improve the performance of the students. The researcher used two groups of students; control and experimental groups in a quasi= experimental design, for this purpose. A total of 323 students were involved in the study and two research instruments were used to collect data from the subjects including English language achievement test[EEAT] which contained an essay writing question, and a modified like scale questionnaire. It was found that students taught essay writing with the tree diagram writing strategy performed better in their essay writing than the control group taught conventionally. It was recommended that teachers should apply strategies that create lasting impression on the minds of the learners and also motivate them to want to involve in the writing task.