How many words per piece in the exam?

[TrueTears]

How the hell do you even write 1500 words in 1 hour besides pre-memorising and writing a piece not properly addressing the topic. Writing on the fly requires thought!

Yup what GerrySly basically said, which I will reinforce further. Write lots of essays beforehand about lots of different prompts, try memorise them if you can, during the exam there is hardly any time to think, regurgitate what you have memorised but change a bit accordingly to the exam. This is exactly what I did, luckily for me the exam topics were quite similar to the ones I memorised so there was not much to change, my lang analysis was around 1000 words, text response 1100-1200 and context was around 1400-1500. Since you can't memorise for lang analysis (I tried memorising some general sentences/phrases, at least 100+, since I am naturally bad at English, but trust me it doesn't work that well) so you gotta really practise those and get your teacher to mark them, it was the one which let me down in the exam

[98.40_for_sure]

Heh i think my teacher is getting sick of marking my shitty essays. I just bombarded her with a bunch and she's gonna go to my house and give them to me tomorrow cos ive got a practice exam on monday. TT what mark did you get for each essay?

[Hutchoo]

He got a 46- so something impressive no doubt.

[TrueTears]

I can't rmb exactly, forgot anything English related long time ago, maybe you can check the report for English or something, I got 46, so yeah however many marks you need to drop to get 46. I do remember getting a 10 for context though, I think I dropped most on Lang analysis.

[98.40_for_sure]

The most i reckon i can get is scrape an A+ with 8 8 8 or something. I guess that doesn't even get me over the 40 line

[lynt.br]

EZ has put it perfectly, however, do not be scared into thinking you have to write 1400-1500 word essays to score over 45. I wrote about four pages for each section which is probably somewhere around 1000-1200 words each. Your focus shouldn't be hitting some arbitrary word target. Instead, concentrate on developing ideas that you can write about effortlessly. Then work on tightening your writing so you can fit more ideas into less words.

[bomb]

Thanks EZ. You hit the nail on the head

I was asking not for a word count to aim for, but rather an indication of how in-depth I should go with my responses.

I'm a bit worried now about the exam though, I've been putting up 1000 words in 1.5 hour SACs

[Yitzi_K]

Now this is really getting me worried... I always thought I was decent in English, and I'm ranked pretty high in my year, but there is no way I can get 3500 words down in the exam. I'd be hard pushed to get 900 words for each section.

Having said that, my brother got 44 and he says he only had around 700 words per essay.

[_avO]

900 words would be around 15wpm, but consider the thinking time needed to write which would probably equate to half the writing time so 30wpm or ~2-3 lines every 2 minutes depending on your handwriting seems doable don't you think?

[Yitzi_K]

well when you put it like that, it does seem easy..

although it's not handwriting speed that worries me, content is the real issue

[Blakhitman]

Had an English practice exam at school yesterday, and I (yes I) can say it is definitely doable if you have a lot of practice.

[Yitzi_K]

Yeh I'm doing an essay every day now, and I am hitting 1000 words consistently within the hour.

[bomb]

Ive decided on settling for 3 pages for each thing now

[Nic K]

If my English teacher (who is an examiner and got a 50 in English) saw this forum, she would be horrified by some of the posts.....

[taiga]

I tried doing a full english exam in 1.5 hours as a challenge.

I got 9/10, 8/10, 7/10 from a teacher who is generally a fair marker.

If it is any indication my word/essay went from about 1100 for the language analysis to 700 by the time I got to the last essay. All my arguments/topic sentences are already in my head, but the length IS a contributing factor, if you can't get enough "quality" writing in, you won't get a good mark.

Ive decided on settling for 3 pages for each thing now

If you're referring to memorizing essays; let's be honest, most of the best students do exactly that.