What we read
We have now read and thought about Bixby and Scanlons (2013, p. 56) ideas and suggestions to enhance your success in timed exams, which most students have to do at some point in their academic careers.
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Bixby and Scanlon's questions
These are the three questions that Bixby and Scanlon ask us to discuss in their "Over to you" section, which concludes this study skills page.
- What could you do to avoid feeling nervous in timed essay situations?
- Which tips are the most important to you?
- The next time you do timed writing, what will you do differently?
- Which tips will you try?
As usual, you can address the questions in any order. You can write one comment, or if you prefer, two comments. I thought that their second and third questions were the most important, so you might like to start with them; however, you are the writer, and that is a decision for you to make.
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References
- Bixby, J. & Scanlon, J. (2013). Skillful Reading & Writing: Student's Book 3. Oxford: Macmillan Education
To avoid nervousness during timed writing, I believe we should practice more to get it into a habit. I think it is very important to identify a good main idea so I can make sure that I am still on the right track throughout my work. This is a piece of suggestion that I will follow for the next time.
ReplyDeleteI like your suggestion to make sure you have one main idea that everything else is organized around.
DeleteI could practice more and more until it feels natural to write.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, the most important tip is 'Analyze the essay question (prompt)'. Reading the question again will make you recognize the points of the question and answer it correctly while writing.
I will try 'Analyze the essay question (prompt)'. Because most of the time I do timed-writing essay, my ideas are often not relevant to the question. For example, the question was, as I can recalled, 'Why should we build new dams' and my idea was mostly about the benefits of the dams, which my teacher wasn't really happy with it since it's not relevant to the answer. Therefore, I think 'Analyzing the question' will be a good way for me to get rid of this problem.
I think that all of Bixby and Scanlon's suggestions are helpful. If I were trying to make one suggestion that covers them all, it would be to take time to plan before you start writing. This means you need to be clear about what the question asks you to do, choose the right sort of topic for a strong answers, get a lot of ideas, and organize them around one strong thesis that clearly gives your answer to the question. If you have done these steps before you start to write, you don't have to worry about what to write or in what order, you can concentrate on turning your solid ideas into well-written and logically organized sentences in paragraphs that are clearly an introduction, a body and a conclusion. And of course, then you want to spend some time reading what you have written from the point of view of a reader. it's helpful to imagine that your reader has not seen the question you are answering: you want your work to make sense independently of any question, so imagining that your reader has not seen the question you are answering is a useful way to test for this. Finally, proofread, going through sentence by sentence without paying attention to the ideas, just focussing on the language: do the verbs match the nouns? Is the spelling right? Do you need an article anywhere? Have you got full stops and commas where they are needed?
ReplyDeletePerhaps I should have taken another minute to plan how to more effectively split that one long paragraph into three shorter paragraphs for a short essay.
DeleteThe most important tips for me is tip number 5 which is to refer to your outline regularly and to add only new ideas that relate to the thesis statement. Bixby and Scanlon also remind us not to try to write as much as possible but to write to answer the question clearly. In other words, we should worry about the quality of our essays not the quantity.
ReplyDeleteNext time I write a timed essay, I will analyze the essay question more clearly to a get good thesis statement and then stick with it to gather ideas which are related to it. I will also spend more time in revising my essay as well.
My way of trying to decrease the nervousness when writing timed essays is to practice a lot. The more I write, the more I am fluent in written English and it would make me a lot less nervous.
The tip that is the most important for me is to analyze the essay question because even if we write many things in our essay but it doesn't answer the question we will lose our point in the exam. I can avoid feeling nervous in timed essay by I need to practice more so that I will not be nervous in the real situation. The next time I do timed writing, thing that I will do differently is I will plan my time carefully because usually I don't plan my time in an essay and it turn out that it become a messed.
ReplyDeleteThe most important tip for me is "Plan your time carefully". I think this is quite hard because after I plan my time I usually don't follow my plan, for example, writing in a time that I keep for revising. So, I think this is the most important tip for me.
ReplyDeleteNext time I do timed writing I think I should try "read and revise". I've find it's really hard to read my writing again and revise them; it looks like I can't find my mistakes so, I can't correct them.
The tip that is most helpful for me is to identify the main idea because the whole essay is to support the main idea. When you get the idea for the essay and making thesis statement, the tusk that have left is to just give details and examples to support it, which is not sound too horrible to do.
ReplyDeleteThe next time I do the timed writing I will try to identify my main idea first then gather and organize my main point and supporting idea. I think these two tips is the most important thing to make the essay has organization and more significant, answer the question clearly.
In my opinion, identifying your main idea is the most important thing for writing an essay. The propose of essays is to communicate to others about your opinion for a specific issue, so your essay will answer the prompt, or not, it depends on your main idea.
ReplyDeleteNext time, when I do timed writing, I will take more time to identify my idea clearly before starting an essays. It will be pretty different from my old planing, because I think a clear main idea will make me easier to organize any following supports.
*purpose in the line two
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ReplyDeleteThis is a great longer term strategy. The best way to learn to write well, in any language or style, is to read extensively in that area.
DeleteOn our earlier discussion topic this morning, this is of course a great advantage that AI driven systems have over humans: they can take in and analyse vast data sets that no individual human could ever hope to even read, let alone master.
The most important tip that the writer have to consider first is what does the question ask about. Since the timed essay will always have a question to the writer, the writer should really answer the question and do not miss any points about what they ask. If you misunderstand the question, the whole writing might be meaningless as your writing is not what the reader expect to get. By making this mistake, it is equivalent to not write anything as you didn't say anything about the question or the topic. If you make the writing mistake in other parts, you might still be able to express some ideas that you really want, which might just not good enough; it is not as significant as missing the point.
ReplyDeleteThis is really reflect what I would do for my next time writing that I would try to answer the question first.
I think gather and organize main points and supporting ideas is the most important for me to plan and find examples or details to support my ideas and the details must clearly.
ReplyDeleteOne of the things that I do in order to avoid feeling nervous in timed essay situation is to do a lot of writing practices before going to the test, this will help me to be relax. The more I practice, the better I am.
ReplyDeleteThe most important tip for me is how to organize the idea before writing and how to explain clearly about that idea. For this challenging, I try to find out the way that make my writing better than before by reading more books and attending some writing class.
For next time, the thing I will do writing differently is to complete writing on time with a well-organized idea and relevant reason support.
Because I don't know what the question of the topic I have to write so, the most important tip for me in the writing work is read many articles in many fields for getting the new idea to write not only I will learn in new vocabulary but also I will get the knowledge, correct spelling and grammar and I can publish what I have known to the readers.
ReplyDelete