Stop Timing Essays

A student asked us how to write faster, a few weeks after joining, and our answer begins with slowing down. The exams have a clock, and the language papers leave little spare time. A student who is still on paragraph one, while the pen at the next desk starts paragraph three, can feel the minutes going.

Suppose you were that student: what would you practise first? The obvious answer is timed practice: a past paper, a timer on the desk, and another paper the next week, a little faster each time. We think that is the right exercise at the wrong time. The minutes you are losing are more likely to be hiding inside your sentences than in the speed of your hand.

Look at the last paragraph you wrote and count the times you stopped in the middle of it to decide something small, such as where a comma should go. Each stop costs a pause and a re-read. On its own, each one feels like nothing.

Nobody is counting your words

If you slow down, you may write less, and that will cost you marks only where the paper says so. There is no minimum length and no maximum length in a GCSE English answer. Examiners do not measure how much a student wrote, because they are judging how convincing the answer is. Nobody in the exam hall gets a mark for writing quickly, and a weak answer written at speed is still a weak answer, only finished sooner.

A few questions are exceptions, and you can spot them because the paper prints the number. 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 also says “Write about 200 to 300 words”. Where a paper gives a number, that number is an instruction, and everywhere else length is not what is being measured.

Why does that matter? Picture what a student does the moment they believe length is the measurement: they write more, they write faster, and each paragraph says less. One paragraph done properly can earn more than a page written at speed.

Guidelines, not guarantees

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, count roughly one analytical paragraph for every four marks: two paragraphs for an eight-mark question, three for a twelve-mark one. A literature essay gets one shape and keeps it, with an introduction, three body paragraphs and a conclusion. More marks never mean more paragraphs, only more depth inside the same five.

Those paragraph counts are guidelines, not guarantees. Writing four paragraphs for a sixteen-mark question does not secure full marks, and writing two or three does not prevent a top grade. A paragraph is only a container, and the marks are given for what goes inside.

Speed lives in the mind, not the hand

Students and parents hear the word speed and picture a pen moving faster. Speed actually comes from automaticity, which is your brain’s ability to do something while spending almost no thinking on it.

Think of a martial artist, who drills one movement so many times that in a competition the block seems to arrive before the punch. Commentators call that reflexes, meaning it as praise for the fighter, when what they are really praising is the hours of drilling behind it.

Writing works the same way, because your attention is limited and every question you cannot yet answer takes a share of it. Where does the comma go? Is this a metaphor or is it personification? How do I start this sentence? On its own, each of those questions is trivial. Three of them running at once are not trivial at all, and the attention they use up should have gone on the analysis.

The part of the mind that has to hold all of those questions at once has a name in psychology. 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] Put into ordinary words, a crowded mind makes worse plans, writes worse sentences, and misses more of its own mistakes.

So the way out is to make some of that thinking unnecessary, rather than to think harder. Researchers reviewing McCutchen’s work reach the same conclusion: 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]

When a student does get faster, the speed comes from the stops disappearing. A student who once had to work out where the comma goes, or whether a line about the sea is a metaphor or personification, now answers both without a pause. The attention those questions used to take goes on the analysis instead.

A student asking how to write faster is asking about the last step of a staircase. The first step is to practise the small skills, one at a time, until you can use them without stopping to think. How long that takes, we do not know. Speed can be trained, and in the end it should be, but training it first is the mistake.

Slow at first, fast afterwards

Because training speed first is the mistake, we ask students to slow down at the start, and 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 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.”

Then he said it 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.”

He spent three or four hours on work meant to take two hours. Then he walked out of the exam hall with full marks on a paper.

Built for the unexpected question

In Yusuf’s Literature exam, the question on The Sign of the Four was about setting, and 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 did he do next? 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 reached for 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 simply: “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.

We think automatic skills are for exactly that kind of day, the day the exam asks you something nobody prepared you for. When a student can build a paragraph without stopping to think about its shape, every bit of thinking they have left can go into the one hard problem in front of them, even a question that nobody expected.

This term, slow down

If you are early in the programme, do not time yourself yet. Take as long as each piece needs, and get one paragraph right before you move on to the next.

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 still a skill, and there will be a time to train it on purpose, with the clock back on the desk. That time comes when the comma, the metaphor and the first word of each sentence no longer make you stop. Until then, our answer to the student who asked how to write faster is the advice Yusuf gave the students in that interview: worry about the quality of your writing, because speed comes afterwards.

Five things to do this week

1. Put the clock away for your next three pieces of writing. Take whatever time each one needs.

2. Name the one thing you keep stopping to work out: where the comma goes, how to open a paragraph, metaphor or personification. Write it on a card and practise only that this week.

3. Learn one paragraph shape by heart, so you can write it without looking it up. That shape is what you rely on when a question nobody prepared you for appears in June.

4. Re-write a paragraph you have already been marked on, instead of writing a new one. The second attempt is where you find out whether the fix has lasted.

5. Parents: ask to see one paragraph, not the whole essay. Then ask your child which part they had to stop and think about, because whatever they name is not yet automatic.

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