Hello everyone.
We have been doing English Practice Exams at school during the holidays.
I have not been able to finish any of them.
The teacher says she is not worried and that at this stage quality is better, however there is only 4 weeks to go, will I get quicker in so little time? Is that possible?
Any advice is most welcome,
Many thanks
A lot of people have this problem
. I've had high-scoring friends who suffered from this, and high-scoring students of mine who struggled with this. The bright side is, if you practise, you improve. Think of kicking a footy on your opposite foot. At first it's super awkward, you have to think a lot about it and it takes you way longer than kicking on your natural foot. However, if you keep practising, your opposite foot inevitably feels more natural. If you practise your writing, it will inevitably feel more fluid to you. That said, it's definitely important to keep the quality.
One thing you could try is writing an essay as fast as you can, say it takes you two hours. Then you can write the next essay aiming for one hundred and ten minutes. Then one hundred minutes. And so on, down to sixty minutes. Mark the point on the page when one hour lapses. My friend used this method to go from just under three hours, handwritten, to just over an hour in the exam (he didn't finish any of his pieces, but still walked away with 57/60 in the exam).
You could also try writing as much as you can in an hour and then stopping once the hour hits. I think this method is really inferior.
You could try writing one paragraph in fifteen minutes, using the same method as I mentioend up there ^^. Eventually, you'll consistenlty be able to write fifteen minute paragraphs. That should boost your confidence heaps with writing a normal essay, because you only have to write a fifteen minute paragraph three times in a row.
Once you start practising this stuff, you'll also realise you often write similar things for various essay topics. Once you've taken notice of that, you can start to identify when that particular thing is appropriate to write, and then on the times that it's appropriate to write, you can write it quicker than you would write something off the top of your head. This isn't memorisation, just writing something you're already familiar with to speed things up. The primary aim isn't really to speed things up though, that's just a bonus, your primary aim should be to write quality material, and one would assume that if you're writing something often, the reason you're writing it often is because it's good stuff.
As far as "can I do it in so little time"... well, yeah. You could probably fit the entire year into these four weeks. Lol. Think about it... Four weeks is just less than thirty days. If you write an essay a day - which isn't a huge ask - that's just under thirty essays. How many essays have you written all year? Chances are it's a shit tonne less than thirty. The amount of time left has nothing to do with it. It's the amount of work you can do. Your question shouldn't be "can I do it in four weeks?" but, "can I do it in X amount of essays?" Fifteen essays. That's huge to improve your time. Like, if you wrote fifteen, aiming to improve on each one, you'd be a pro. If you asked at the start of the year "do I have enough time to improve", it'd just be "do you have enough time to write fifteen essays?"... Same here.
*Note: I know how Year 12s love to obsess over numbers and five thousand people probably just thought OMG YEAH YEAH YAY YAY I'M GONNA WRITE FIFTEEN ESSAYS OMG YEAH". --- The number isn't important, it's your improvement that is important. The more you do, the more you'll improve. That's the principle. Ignore the number. Pretty sure I did a fair bit less than fifteen essays in the exam period.
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