Proofreading an Essay Exam: Student Writers
Elaine Maimon
One of the most important things about taking an essay exam successfully is something that isn't often told to students, and that is to give yourself at least three to five minutes at the end, to time yourself, so that you can read it over. I think one of the biggest mistakes that students make is that they turn into an instructor who is going to put a grade on the exam, something that they haven't read at all themselves. And I think that learning that skill of reading over what you've read, and making sure, for example, that in your haste you haven't omitted words, I've looked at a number of student essay exams, and I am sure that a sentence that another instructor might think is a sign of illiteracy was really a sign of haste, and that the problem with the sentence was a missing word, that the student has simply zoomed along and not put it in.

Thomas Fox
If you're a really confident student, you can do the whole writing process except revision, you know, in ten minutes or half an hour or 90 minutes that you use to write this essay. You brainstorm, you list what you know, you organize it briefly, you draft it, and you leave a teeny bit of time to go back and make sure you didn't make terrible editing mistakes.

Maimon
On an essay exam, you've got some time pressure. OK, how do you deal with it? OK, how is that like and not like the pressure that a journalist working on deadline has? And I think that that's an interesting discussion. That is, what is your goal when you are a reporter, you need to get an article filed before the deadline, what are your responsibilities in terms of not taking shortcuts, that maybe you're tempted to take, because you have to file the thing for the deadline. So I think that that kind of discussion of strategy and consequences is what I would want to emphasize in any kind of writing course.