HOW TO WRITE FASTER DURING EXAMS

Let’s face it, we all sometimes have trouble finishing an essay during exams.

Try writing tall and skinny

Our hands are constructed so that our fingers can move up and down, not side to side. Thus, by writing with a more up and down motion, your hand can move faster and also prevents your writing from getting too messy. Have you noticed skinny writing usually looks neater and messy writing usually is quite stretched out?

Work those arms! Don’t just use your wrists!

Don’t just turn your wrists. Move your arms side by side at a constant rate as well. By moving your arms instead of your wrists, you’ll remove stress from turning your wrists. Allow your arm to guide your hand, not your wrist. Your writing will become straighter as well.

Relax your hands

Don’t grip your pen so hard that you overwork your muscles. You’ll just add more strain to your hands. This usually happens with thin pens that have little grip to them. If you can, choose a pen that has a moderate thickness that you can get a good grip of.

Use smoother pens

Other than the width of the pen, the smoothness of how the pen rolls over paper can also determine how fast and well you write. Have a read at our post on our favourite pens.

Sit properly

Hunching over and having your face next to your paper not only strains your eyes, neck and back, but also applies additional weight and pressure on your arms and hands. Your hands will end up tiring at a faster rate. So sit back in a relaxed posture when you are writing.

 

Practice, practice, practice

You ain’t gonna have the fastest writing overnight! If you’ve been typing on a computer for your whole life, suddenly having to write hundreds of pages under exam pressure can be challenging. It’s important that you practice writing essays and papers at home beforehand (which you probably should be doing anyway in revising/practicing for exams). If you don’t, your hands may start feeling really sore during your exam as they’re not used to writing that much.

Utilise your other hand and arm as well!

Use your other hand and arm for other tasks as much as possible during exams. For example, use your other hand to flip pages and do the erasing. All these small things add up and could waste precious time for you. Furthermore, if you do have to slightly lean forward, put your weight on the other arm to place as little pressure as possible on the writing arm.

Jack Zheng | N° 75