Roughly 1000 words is the unofficial recommended guideline. As drake says, if you write less than 800, you have to be writing extremely well to attain very high marks. It's all about efficiency though; if you take four sentences in Language Analysis to explain what another student could do in just one, you might feel good about the fact that you're writing seven pages, but that other student could score just as well without going overboard. Then, if you're efficient, you give yourself the opportunity to cover a whole lot more stuff. The fact that the higher scoring students write in excess of a thousand words is because they have more than a thousand words' worth of content to fill their piece. You definitely shouldn't waffle just to make the arbitrary limit, but be aware that if you're at a disadvantage if you're not able to cover as much.
Regarding speed, are you a slow writer because you need to stop and think or lose your train of thought? Or is it that you physically can't write faster without hurting your hand or writing illegibly?
The first is a problem with your understanding of the content, so you need to revisit the task requirements or the texts you're studying. The second is more of a logistic issue and could probably be solved with practice. Very few students will be able to write ~1000 words in an hour at this stage of the year, but by September, it seems way more doable.
One thing I recommend (courtesy of a friend studying hand anatomy
) is that you make your writing taller. It's way more natural for you to make up-and-down hand movements (eg. like patting someone on the head) than it is to go from side to side (eg. waving goodbye to a friend who's weirded out by your patting.) So it's naturally quicker for you to write long, tall letters than it is to write short, compressed ones. Idk, it's a minor change, but if handwriting is impeding speed or clarity, it's worth spending some time improving it
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