In our age of digital technologies, most people go through life without writing anything by hand on a day-to-day basis, probably except for an occasional grocery list. We don’t practice handwriting – even students do most of their writing work using PCs and laptops, from doing their homework to making lecture notes. However, the Summary of Research Presented at Handwriting in the 21st Century states that the real benefits of writing by hand are: a brain activation, an impact on academic success and a foundation for reading, writing, language, and critical thinking.
Most of the time our inability to write fast while retaining legibility isn’t a big issue – it is just a skill that has a very limited application in everyday life.
The situation changes during the exams – suddenly you have not just to write by hand but to do it quickly. Your fingers get tired, handwriting gets worse. You glance at the clock and see that you won’t make it on time, you get more and more nervous, start hurrying, forgetting what you wanted to say and making a terrible mess. If it is a familiar situation, you don’t have to be depressed – there are ways to increase your overall writing speed without practicing day and night. What’s even better, there isn’t much you can achieve by mechanical practice.
You should understand that handwriting is very different from typing – you cannot speed it up much by simply writing faster – you can achieve much better results by learning to use your existing writing ability more efficiently.
The Ability to Write Fast and Neat in Exams while Answering Questions
An exam type you are most likely going to face in any discipline is writing freeform answers to a number of questions. Here are some tricks you can use to improve your writing speed:
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Where possible, write in bullet points instead of paragraphs. | It gives you a legitimate reason to write in a fragment, concentrating on the most important aspects of the question and omitting less crucial ones. You don’t have to think of logical connections between sentences. You are less concerned with the style of your answers and aren’t tempted to get back to the question once you’ve finished with it. |
| Divide your effort depending on the number of marks. | Questions have a varying number of marks assigned to them (usually from 1 to 10). You should always start with the most valuable ones, answer them if possible and progress to the less valuable ones, dedicating a reasonable amount of time to each of them. 1-point questions aren’t worth spending ten minutes writing them up – even if you have time to spare, you can probably better apply it elsewhere. |
| Don’t be in a hurry. | If you get nervous and try to finish every question as quickly as possible, it will harm both your handwriting and your overall speed writing. You won’t be able to think clearly, make a lot of mistakes, get back to the question later on and waste more time on corrections than if you write carefully and think things through from the outset. |
| Aim at using 1 page per answer, as paper isn’t usually an issue during the exams. | Not only your answers will look neat separated this way, but you also get an opportunity to write short using schematic bullet points for answers to all questions and get back to them to elaborate later on if time allows. |
| Take part in mock exams. | It is the only way to get the real feelings of how much time you have and how many minutes you can dedicate to each particular question. |
| Express information graphically where possible. | Graphs, charts, diagrams, tables etc. not just allow you to illustrate your answer and express in a few strokes that, otherwise, would’ve taken a couple dozen words but makes your answers stand out from the bulk as well. |
The Ability to Write an Essay Fast in an Exam
Not all disciplines require you to write essays, but for those that do, this kind of work is responsible for a lot of credits. Learning how to write a good essay neatly will go a long way toward ensuring your academic success. Here are a few ways to help you do it successfully:
#1 Write essays in the exam environment simulated by yourself
You will be surprised how many students try everything when preparing for their exams but a practice is obvious. Find or create the exact conditions of your future exam: find out how much time you will be given, whether there is going to be a word limit, what questions and prompts were used for this exam in the past and so on. Then sit down and write an essay simulating these conditions as closely as possible. Besides, you’ll manage to note how much time you need to write a an essay of a particular size.
#2 Start with an outline
It may be almost physically painful to spend precious minutes on anything, but on actual writing during your exam, but trust us: every minute you spend planning and preparing an outline is likely to save you ten minutes later on. Enumerate all main and supporting points, set the order in which they will be mentioned, how your introduction will be tied together with the conclusion and so on – or at least mark them with keywords so that you don’t forget anything.
#3 Avoid perfectionism
It is a good idea no matter what kind of writing you do, but it is really important when your time is limited. Don’t overthink it – your job is to write as quickly and clearly as possible, not to write a masterpiece for the ages. Get your point across and don’t correct things you’ve already written unless you’ve clearly made a mistake.
#4 Decide on the structure of your essay in advance
This trick is useful because it creates boundaries for you to work in and doesn’t allow your mind to run wild when you are hit with an unexpected topic. If you decide beforehand that your essay will have exactly 5 paragraphs irrespectively of its topic, when you are given the task, you simply have to fill in this mold with your writing without creating an amorphous piece of text.
Without any doubt, using these tricks won’t magically turn you into a master writer overnight – but they will certainly boost your chances of getting through your exams successfully. They mostly deal with an organization – but if you know that it is your poor handwriting skills that cause problems, it may be a good idea to apply to the practical guidance “Better handwriting for adults ” by Meliosa Bracken and Pam Buchanan.
