Given enough time, enough research, enough drafts, or even enough English major friends, almost anyone can produce a passable out-of-class essay. But at some time in your composition experience, you will be faced with writing an acceptable essay during a restricted amount of time, frequently 45 to 50 minutes, but sometimes as little as 30 minutes. You will be given an unannounced topic that usually is vague, nebulous, or ambiguous. Presented with such a prospect, you have two simple choices: you can roll your eyes heavenward, lay down your pen (or shut off your word processor), crumple your paper, and fold. Or you can grit your teeth and go to work, keeping in mind the following guidelines for writing timed essays.
1. Read the topic carefully.
Be sure that you thoroughly understand what is expected of you. If you do not do exactly what the topic asks, you will undoubtedly produce an unsatisfactory paper.
2. Take five minutes to plan your essay.
Do not write a word of your essay until you have restricted the assigned topic (if necessary), decided how to organize your paper, developed a brief outline of your major points (for the discussion paragraphs), and formulated a satisfactory thesis. It may seem fruitless to use your valuable time in these preparatory efforts, but these are the most important minutes you will spend. If you take as long as ten minutes to get through these preliminaries, do not worry. In any kind of writing, good initial planning is critical to the quality of the final product.
3. Stand by your argument and stay focused on your thesis.
Do not stray into tangential areas that have nothing to do with the original topic. If you have taken the time to create an outline (in step 2 above), you should never have a problem with staying on topic.
4. Back up all generalizations with evidence.
Many students do not realize that most poor essays fail because they lack full development, not because of mistakes in grammar. Supporting details and examples prove your general statements. Without them, you have nothing but unconvincing platitudes.
5. Use writing aids intelligently.
Most instructors will permit you to bring a dictionary and a thesaurus to an in-class writing session; some will even allow you to bring a handbook of grammar and usage. You might have these tools available to you through your word processing program. But do not let these aids lull you into a false sense of security. America's classrooms are littered with the bones of students who wasted too much time searching their reference works for the spellings and synonyms of too many words. Reasonable graders will not evaluate a timed writing assignment as critically as they would an out-of-class paper. They will make allowances for the circumstances under the work is produced. They will be more tolerant of misspellings and small errors in diction and usage.
You should devote your time to writing, not to thumbing pages or scanning help screens. If you find yourself looking for the spellings of more than three or four words, or for the synonyms of more than two or three, or for any but the most critical aspects of usage, you are wasting your valuable time.
6. Write vigorously.
Avoid passive voice, wordiness, euphemisms, contractions, and clich‚s. Use strong verbs and avoid the weak ones such as "be" (and its many cousins) and "do."
7. Write legibly, but do not fret too much about neatness.
While you should strive to write legibly if you are not using a word processor, you need not waste time worrying about appearances. Do not hesitate to cross out words or phrases; do not shrink from adding words with carets or even adding material in the margins. You need not even refrain from obliterating entire paragraphs, but keep in mind that in doing so you are tacitly admitting some carelessness in your original planning.
8. Save a few minutes for careful proofreading.
Even though you may not want to look at your paper so soon after writing it, force yourself. Reading your essay in reverse order sentence by sentence will help you catch the omission of small words (a, an, the, etc.) and can help you find glaring errors in grammar and diction. With a few minutes left, now is the time to check on the spelling of doubtful words, or on small grammatical problems, or other bits of housekeeping. Read your introductory paragraph and then your conclusion. Are they logically related? Does the final paragraph adequately conclude the essay, or is it a lame collection of sentences tacked on to the end of the paper? Have you wandered off the subject? A bit of time devoted to these matters will pay its own rewards.