How should i approach writing an essay in exam conditions?

Writing an essay under timed conditions can be very scary, and it’s easy to panic and launch straight into your answer in the hopes that you’ll have more time to write it. However, it is very important to plan your answer before writing the essay. The first Assessment objective (AO1) is worth the most marks and is based on how well you structure your essay and the argument you put forward. This is one of the reasons it is so important to plan your essay first. Once all your ideas are on paper infront of you (or at least most of them, you can always add to it if you think of new ideas while writing), you can begin to make links between ideas and see a line of argument emerging from your analysis. I would recommend jotting down this argument once you have decided on it in a sentence or so to help you keep it in mind. Having this argument in your head before writing means your introduction (which many people find particularly difficult, including myself) becomes a lot easier when you know exactly what your argument will be. But how specifically do you plan an essay? Well there’s many ways to do it but for me personally i find it easiest to start with the analysis as that makes up the core of your essay. Once all your ideas for analysis has been jotted down, you can begin to group together ideas or create an order for them, based on how well they fit together and lead on to one another. This planning can seem like it will be extremely time consuming in the exam and you will have no time to write the actual essay. However the way to avoid this is, like anything, to practise it. When revising set yourself questions substituting in a different theme for each question, and then try and plan your answer. Over time you will become faster till you can cut this planning time down to just 10/15 minutes. You will also become more confident in doing this until eventually, when you enter the exam, you will know exactly how to go about planning your answer and still have time left to write the essay itself. Most importantly, you will be less likely to panic. So take a deep breath, read the question, read it again, highlight key terms to make sure you fully understand all the elements of what it is asking you and you haven’t missed anything, and then begin to plan.