Writing for an Essay Exam: Student Writers
Beverly Moss
And if you've got an essay exam, and you've got forty five minutes, what is it you need to do to, to… I guess what is it that you need to do to show that you understand the assignment, and that you can maybe apply concepts, but I think it really does depend on what field it's in. But I think you have to say OK, I've got forty five minutes, here are the important issues I must address. What's the best way to organize them and to support them, and to keep thinking, OK, key issues, what's my evidence, what do I want to conclude about them?

Kay Halasek
Because that situation is so antithetical to everything that we teach students in first year writing courses. That is that writing is a process, that you should do prewriting and work on inventing ideas before you actually begin drafting, that once you draft you should revise a text. I mean, you can see that timed writing situations are… simply don't work with our pedagogy. And what we're teaching writing, and in fact, in our writing classes. And in fact, students who come from our basic writing program at Ohio State, who have learned this and really internalized the writing process and worked diligently at becoming students who invent, draft, and revise. Who come into their first writing course in the first year program. They're asked then to do a piece of timed writing. And they often don't do well.

Mike Rose
On the other hand, don't get so crazy about that clock that you throw out the window all of the things you know about planning and thinking ahead and trying to structure a decent essay. It is gonna be worth your while to take a few minutes out of the beginning of your time, allotted time, to kind of think through what you're gonna do. To take a few minutes, to calm down, to take a deep breath, to plot out what you want to write about, to make a little list, and then to go at it. Those are some of the things I tell students when they have to confront these unusual and not very friendly writing situations.

Elaine Maimon
When I talk about helping students to survive the essay exam, I want to make clear that I'm not talking about a formula for the essays. That I'm talking about strategies. Here are some things that may be helpful to you to try. We're not talking about a formula for the perfect essay exam question. And what is really important for students is that they are able to think strategically.

Moss
What is really important, and not only with essay exams, but with helping students understand how to read writing assignments, is to teach them to look for key word concepts. If a teacher says, describe the process, then we need to talk to students about what that means. That doesn't mean, then, that you do an argumentative essay. That's not what the teacher's looking for, that assignment's not calling for an argumentative essay. It's asking you to go through the steps of how something happened. Now the assignment may say describe the process and then analyze, well, those are two different things that that assignment's asking for. They need to know what it means to describe a process and what it means to do an analysis. Sometimes I think people get caught not understanding the difference. And not understanding those concepts. So you get the descriptive essay, when someone's asking for an analysis.

Patricia Scully
I teach my students to, when they're faced with a timed writing situation, there will typically be a prompt. Annotate the prompt. Write on the prompt, you've got to underline the key words. If it says "discuss" I want to see that little circle, that I'm going to look at your rough draft to make sure you have circled discussed, if it says "explained" you have circled explained and you know what those words mean. …
Other key phrases are "compare and contrast," "argue." The prompt is always going to be your thesis statement. They have it for you. Don't do too much work, do exactly what you're told to do.

Chitra Divakaruni
Tests are generally asking you for information. They want to see if you know certain kinds of information, they want to see if you can process and problem solve certain kinds of issues and use information to do it, and they want to understand that you can do it. And therefore you have to be clear, you have to be organized, and you have to manage your time. And one of the things I teach them to do is a brief three–minute outline that they will write before they write their essay, in which they organized all their points, they put maybe a couple of important examples under each point, and then they go for it.