How to Write Essays Faster
Whether you are in high school or college, one part of your experience is going to remain the
same – namely, essay writing. You will have to write a lot of essays during all stages of your
academic journey, and working on them is going to occupy a significant portion of your time.
Learning how to do it more efficiently, how to speed up this process without sacrificing quality
is of crucial importance if you want to achieve any lasting success in school or college. In this
article, we have gathered some of the best tips on how to do it.
1. Learn Touch-Typing
This tip won’t be of much help if you want to speed up your paper writing right now – touchtyping is not something you can learn in one sitting. You may have to spend a few weeks
training for a couple of hours every day, at least if you want to see quick results. However, in
the long run, it can be one of the best ways to invest your time in college. A skilled touchtypist can type at the speed of 60 words per minute and more, which is at least twice as fast
as your average “hunt and peck” typist. In other words, if you have this skill, you can produce
written text as fast as you form it in your head. Considering how many research papers and
other assignments you will have to write throughout your academic career, a few weeks of
training is a small price to pay for such a boost in efficiency.
2. Remove Distractions
Some distractions may be difficult to prevent – for example, it may be hard to persuade your
family members or roommates to leave you alone when you are trying to focus on your work.
However, these days most distractions we have to face are of a different nature. Social media,
email notifications, phone calls, web surfing, TV working in the background, your smartphone
within easy reach and constantly tempting you to take a break for a couple of minutes – you
are much more likely to be distracted by these things than by somebody dropping by for a
chat. Fortunately, you can easily get rid of this sort of distraction. Turn off your phone and TV,
install apps that prevent you from visiting websites you tend to waste your time on, put on
noise-canceling headphones to block out irrelevant sounds. Distractions caused by humans
can also be alleviated: go somewhere you are unlikely to be bothered, like a library or a café
you don’t usually visit.
3. Write an Outline
When you have an essay to write, it is easy to decide that every minute counts, and you
cannot afford to waste your time drafting it. It is a fallacious conclusion. Every minute you
spend preparing an outline for your essay is worth five or more minutes of actual writing. By
preparing an outline, you make sure you will not forget to mention any crucial details or
repeat yourself. You save yourself the potential trouble of rewriting parts of your essay later
on (after you realize that they do not work with each other). Finally, you improve the overall
quality of your writing. As a result, by spending a few minutes drafting an outline, you can
save a lot of time and effort down the road.
4. Delegate Some of Your Work
Sometimes students do not have any other choice but to look for help with their assignments.
Considering the amount of work you have to deal with in college, it is only natural. It may be
a good idea to consider hiring professional writers to assist you from an academic assistance
service. Essays written for you by the experts working for these agencies are in no way inferior
to what you could have written yourself, and are often relatively cheap.
5. Choose an Interesting Topic
If you have an opportunity to choose your own topic, do not waste it and think of something
that genuinely interests you. When you are personally invested in the subject matter of your
essay, it is both faster and easier to achieve the desired results. You will waste less time
looking for information, as you already know something about the topic, and the very flow of
your writing is going to be smoother and more natural.
6. Make Sure You Understand the Assignment
It may seem self-evident, but it is all too common for a student to skim over an assignment
and assume he/she understands everything, only to discover later on that he/she has missed
a few crucial points, and now has to spend a few hours making corrections. Of all the ways to
waste time when writing an essay, it is probably the worst and the most time-consuming.
Therefore, always make sure you read the assignment several times and are 100 percent
confident you understand everything. If you have any doubts, consult your teacher or
professor.
7. Do One Thing at a Time
When you write, do just this: write. Do not get back to the sentence you just wrote to express
your thoughts more precisely, do not correct your typos, do not rewrite parts that you have
already written. Make it your primary goal to always proceed forward and complete the essay
as fast as possible. Every time you get back to reword something, you waste precious minutes,
and it may not be necessary to make any changes in the first place. If changes are necessary,
you will have a chance to introduce them later on, when you do the actual editing and
proofreading.
The speed at which you write your essays heavily depends on many factors: how fast you
type, how much time you spend on research, what topic you are dealing with. Trying to
influence any factor in isolation from others is unlikely to produce a significant effect – only
by targeting them all at once you can greatly improve the speed at which you write essays.
Follow these suggestions, and you will achieve the desired result!