Psychology essay timing

KR0505

Any tips on how to improve my essay timing as I often go over?

Reply 1

University of Suffolk student

Official Rep

Original post by KR0505

Any tips on how to improve my essay timing as I often go over?

I think this is one of the most challenging parts of writing an essay during a test: having enough time to organize and plan out your thoughts and giving yourself enough time to write and review what you wrote. So I will try my best to provide you with some sound advice, but I want to preface that this is my personal method and might not work for you, so I suggest trying it out and then making micro-adjustments to fit your writing style better.

Personally, I follow a very strict pattern of writing during a test scenario:

I write down all the studies that I want to use for the possible questions on the test based on the topic the test would cover.

I spend 5 - 7 minutes reading the question and immediately outlining my argument on the topic and a rough draft of what studies I'm going to use.

I write as much as I can for 30 - 40 minutes with the majority of the words being relatively close to my final answer.

I spend the remainder of the time reviewing what I wrote and making any corrections that I feel are necessary while referring back to the question.

This should hopefully give me around 15 - 20 minutes to review and rewrite if necessary, which should give me the best possible chance of doing well.

P.S. This is all under the assumption that it's an hour-long assessment (you can make changes depending on how much time you are allotted to write)

If you have any further questions about outlining and organizing your thoughts do let me know. But I do hope this gives you a rough idea of how to plan out your writing approach and helps you with your essay timing.

Derrick