Speed Comes Last

A student asked us this a few weeks after joining. The exams have a clock, the language papers are tight, and writing slowly feels like a problem to be fixed now.

Here is the short answer first. Nobody in the exam gets a mark for writing quickly. The marks are for the quality of what is on the page. Speed can be trained, and eventually it should be. The mistake is training it first. Writing quickly is worth having only once the thinking underneath it is sound, because speed applied to a weak method just produces the weak answer sooner. When it does come, it is rarely a student moving a pen faster. It is a student who no longer has to stop and work out where the comma goes, or whether that image is a metaphor. Those decisions now happen without thought, and the time they used to take goes on the analysis instead.

Nobody is counting your words

There is no minimum length and no maximum length in a GCSE English answer. Examiners do not measure how much a student wrote. They judge how convincing it is.

There are a few exceptions. They are easy to spot, because the paper tells you the number itself. An AQA Language paper asks students to “list 4 things” from a set of lines, or to choose four true statements from eight. A Cambridge IGCSE Language paper asks students to “Choose three examples of words or phrases from each paragraph to support your answer”, and it also says “Write about 200 to 300 words”. When a paper gives a number, that number is an instruction. Everywhere else, length is not the measurement.

This matters because of what students do when they believe length is the measurement. They write more, faster, and thinner. A strong writer can earn a great deal in one paragraph.

Our guidelines, and what they are not

We do give students guidelines, because “write as much as it takes” is useless advice to a fourteen-year-old with forty-five minutes and an empty page.

For a reading question, roughly one analytical paragraph for every four marks. An eight-mark question is about two paragraphs. A twelve-mark question is about three. For a literature essay we teach one shape and keep it: an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. More marks do not mean more paragraphs. More marks mean more depth inside the same five.

Now the part students should hear clearly. These are guidelines, not guarantees. Writing four paragraphs for a sixteen-mark question does not secure full marks. Writing two or three does not prevent a top grade. The paragraphs are a container. The marks are for what is inside them.

What speed actually is

Students and parents hear the word speed and picture writing faster. That is not what is happening.

Speed comes from automaticity. Automaticity is your brain’s ability to do something with almost no thinking power spent on it.

Think of a martial artist. They drill one movement so many times that in a competition the reaction looks like it came before the thought. Commentators say it as if it were a compliment to the fighter’s reflexes. It is really a compliment to the hours.

Writing works the same way. Your attention is limited, and everything you are unsure about takes a share of it. Where does the comma go? Is this a metaphor or is it personification? How do I start this sentence? Each of those is small, and together they are not small at all. A student paying attention to those things has very little attention left for the actual work, which is analysis.

This is well established in the research on writing. Working memory is, in one standard definition, “a limited capacity system allowing the temporary storage and manipulation of information necessary for such complex cognitive tasks as comprehension, learning, and reasoning”.^[1] Deborah McCutchen, in the paper that set out how those limits apply to writing, reports that “effects of capacity limitations are documented in all three component writing processes: planning, translating, and reviewing”.^[2] In other words, a full mind writes worse plans, worse sentences and worse corrections.

The way out is not to think harder. It is to make some of the thinking unnecessary. Researchers reviewing this work put it plainly: when the lower-level parts of writing become automatic enough, the burden on a student’s limited working memory is reduced, and writing works better when the different processes are sufficiently automated.^[3]

So when a student asks how to write faster, the honest answer is that they are asking about the last step. The first step is to build the skills until they stop taking up room.

Take the time now so you do not need it later

This is why we ask students to slow down at the start, and why we do not begin with timed papers.

Yusuf finished with us this summer with a grade 9 in English Language and a grade 9 in English Literature. In our interview with him this month, a student asked him how he had raised the quality of his writing to the examiner’s standard. His answer was about time:

“Take your time… At the beginning, don’t worry about a time limit… Honestly, I took way more than two hours. I might have taken like two, three, four hours. Because once you take your time and you know what you’re doing, once you know what you’re doing, then speed comes afterwards anyways.”

And then, the same idea again: “You just need to know how to structure what to write. And then that’s when speed comes afterwards. Take your time because you need to know it first.”

That is a student who took three or four hours over work that is meant to take two, and who walked out of the exam hall with full marks on a paper.

What automatic skills are actually for

They are for the day the exam does something you did not prepare for.

In Yusuf’s Literature exam, the question on The Sign of the Four was about setting. We had not prepared that question with him. There was no essay plan for it and no model answer written for it. He opened the paper and did not know what to do.

What he did next is the whole point of this article. In his own words: “So what I did is I had to work with what I had and for quotes I use like single word quotes and I tried to find like every single like inference I could make.” Then he held on to the paragraph structure he had been taught: “I did stick to the [paragraph] structure. The [paragraph] structure was my back bone… if you’re in doubt, you have to stick to that back bone.” He described the moment without any drama: “I’ve done like two years of English revision… And I’m not going to stop here because of a [Sign of the Four] question.”

He scored 100% on that paper.

He could do that because he was not spending anything on how to build a paragraph. That was automatic. Every bit of thinking he had left went into the only hard problem in front of him, which was a question nobody had seen coming.

What this means for this term

If you are early in the programme, do not time yourself yet. Take as long as each piece needs. Get the paragraph right, then get the next one right.

Fix one weakness at a time and let it become automatic before you add the next. We have written about why targeted practice beats volume in Why school alone rarely produces a grade 9, and about why the thinking you do is what stays in memory in What if I forget everything before the exam?.

Speed is not the skill you are building. It is what you get back once the skills are built. Yusuf’s advice to the students in that interview was the same, and he had just proved it: worry about the quality of your writing, because speed comes afterwards.

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