Making and Sticking to a Plan of Attack

The biggest enemy when taking an essay exam is time. If you had a few weeks to write the essay, you would probably feel that you had plenty of time, but for an essay test you have only an hour or two. How can you possibly take the writing process and shrink it down into such a short period of time? It seems like it would require a magic trick. Luckily it doesn’t.

The most common mistakes students make in taking essay exams are the related mistakes of not budgeting time well and not following the steps of the writing process. In your English class, you have been learning about brainstorming, outlining, drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading. Budget your time so that you can accomplish all these steps during the essay exam. To understand why this is important and to learn how to do it, consider what’s involved when you write an essay.

When writing an essay out of class, we break up the many tasks of the writing process and do them separately. But when faced with writing an essay exam, students often try to complete all the steps together at the same time. With their focus stretched too thinly over too many tasks, all of which require focus and attention, there’s a good chance they won’t do any of them very well.

Concentrate your focus on one task at a time, so you can complete it well. The best way to do this is to make a plan of action that allows you to focus on each part of the writing process separately.

Of course, to go through the entire writing process in the test’s time frame, you need to budget your time wisely. For a two-hour exam, typically you should budget your time like this:

If your class period is only one hour, then you should shorten the time periods for each task like this:

You are probably thinking that these plans don’t give you enough time for the writing part. Keep in mind, however, that much of what slows a writer down when writing is trying to come up with ideas and keep them organized all while trying to craft strong sentences and remember spelling, grammar, words, and ideas. Anytime you try to do too many things at once, it slows you down. If you separate out each of the steps of the writing process, you won’t need as much time for the writing part of the exam. For more on time management, see Chapter 3, Putting Ideas into Writing, page 000 in your book, and Managing Your Time and Avoiding Procrastination in the e-Chapters for this book.

So what do you do in each of those time slots? Here’s a bit more detail on every stage of the essay-exam writing process.