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For two years I taught English composition classes to groups of twelve to sixteen adults. These were intense, content-focused classes wherein excellence was demanded. Students would often, on the first day, leave class with heavy hearts and a slight feeling of dread. Why? Because I would tell them that they would be writing ten timed essays as part of our class work.

But by the end of our course, several students would invariably report that the timed essays were the best part of the class.

So how did they become comfortable with timed essays? This process involved learning brainstorming and organization strategies, structuring the essay simply, devoting 80% of the time to the actual writing, and spending the last five to eight minutes revising and proofreading.

Learning to brainstorm and organize your thoughts effectively can help anyone become more comfortable with timed essays. The key to brainstorming is to start writing immediately and write down anything that comes to mind. Even if the topic is "Desertification of America's Central States" and you have a thought about water cycles, write it down. This serves two purposes: it keeps your thoughts flowing and even a seemingly disconnected idea might help you support a position.

Thus, as you allow your thoughts to flow through your hands and onto your paper or computer screen, you will often end up with quite a lot of potential content for your timed essay. Organization then becomes key, so that you can meld these thoughts into a logically-flowing argument. To organize quickly, you want to first establish a big picture. Taking the topic mentioned before, you might decide that you want to focus on how desertification happens. Therefore, your essay becomes a description of a process. Next you will need to organize your brainstormed ideas into the logical order that follows the process you are exploring. Finally, plug your details into the sections that you have shaped.

Structuring your essay as simply as possible helps you keep your topic controlled and your thoughts focused. The most simple structure for you to use in order to become comfortable with timed essays will involve an introduction, three to five body sections/paragraphs, and a conclusion. Your introduction should have a hook, discussion, and a thesis statement. Your body paragraphs should have a topic sentence, logically ordered and well-focused support for that topic sentence, and a final sentence that summarizes and leads the reader to the next paragraph. Your conclusion should a have a summary statement, one final thought, and a strong ending sentence that leaves your reader thinking or inspires them to action.

Quite simply, writing your essay should take up the lion's share of your time. Of course you need to brainstorm and organize sufficiently to have material and structure to work with, but the writing is the bulk of your work. So plan out your time so that you devote plenty of time for your prose.

The final technique that will help you become comfortable with timed essays is taking the last five to eight minutes to revise and proofread your essay. I often told my students that there was only one perfect birth and that the first draft was never good enough. Taking these last few minutes to go over your structure, arguments and support, as well as checking for mistakes, can bring your essay's quality up several notches.

In conclusion, timed essays can be stressful for even the most experienced of writers. However, this stress can be mitigated by implementing effective brainstorming, organization, writing and re-writing strategies. What is more, implementing these strategies in all of one's writing can increase both quality and readability. So don't fear the timer any more!

Learn more about this author, Jared Garrett.
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