Counseling Education

5 Time Saving Tips When Writing An Essay

When you are confronted with a long essay to write, you might not know where to start or just how long it will take you to finish. Following these five time management tips will allow you to make the most of your time and achieve the highest grade possible. 

Plan your entire essay
Before you do anything, plan everything. Plan when and where you are going to do your research. Plan an appropriate time to write up your results. Plan when you are going to proof read the essay. Plan when you are going to print it or submit it. If you produce a sensible and workable plan, you will not struggle when trying to stick to it. Do not try and do everything in one day, it just won’t happen.

Remove the distractions
Having the TV on or being logged into Facebook while writing your essay will have a huge impact in the length of time it takes to complete even the simplest of tasks. Find yourself a space or a room where you have minimal distractions, get off the couch and sit at a real desk. It will change your mind-set to work and increase your productivity. Put your writing or resource text's on the wall in front of you, so even when think you are looking at nothing, you are subconsciously reading your research.

Have an incentive
Do not expect to sit and write all day without having an incentive to motivate you. The day will drag and it will not be a productive use of your time. Instead set yourself small incentives that you may have when you complete sections of your work. A chocolate bar, getting a coffee, going for a run, ten minutes on Facebook - all of these are good rewards after you have completed a large section of essay writing.

Work towards the word count 
You have already broken your essay up into separate sections. You should assign a dedicated word count to each of these sections. This will add up to the total word count. The introduction and conclusion will have fewer words than the main body sections. When you work to a strict word count, you will ensure that you do not complete your essay and then have to go back and remove hundreds of words to get down to the word limit.

Check as you go along
When you finish a section of work or have a break, you should re-read the entire previous section. Not only will this remind you of where you were and what you have written but it will break up the checking of your essay into small bites. You will be able to quickly remove any spelling and grammar errors without having to spend hours reading the whole document again.

These five small tips might make the difference between completing your essay on time and handing in an essay that is representative of your skills. Or handing in a half-finished, unchecked, rush-job which you hope will get a pass and you know you will try harder on the next one. So stick to these five tips and you will get the essay grades that you deserve.

Image credit:  crdotx on Flickr