![]() Make sure that you give yourself some time away from your essay before returning to revise your first draft. You get the idea! Step 5: Take a break before editing your work. Focus on completing just one section at a time, and give yourself time for short breaks between writing sessions. Instead of doing everything at once, think of your essay in terms of meaningful sections. Writing an essay in one big chunk is like trying to travel from the Shire to the Lonely Mountain in a single day that is to say, it is downright impossible without the aid of some kind of anachronistic aircraft, and very dangerous to even try doing. Of course, as good as the “just write” mentality is, it can only keep you going for so long. However, if you don’t start writing soon, there won’t be anything to cut, and then you’ll really want to know how to write faster. There will be some clunky sentences, there will be some punctuation errors, and there may even be some paragraphs that don’t make the final cut. ![]() Try your best to communicate the ideas you’ve painstakingly outlined in your map, but most of all, just get those fingers typing and start writing. Not agonizing over every clause, not questioning all life decisions made thus far, and certainly not watching Netflix. You still want to know how to write faster? Well, friend, the key is to start by actually writing. Your map is written, you’re out of your hobbit-hole door and into the world, and you’re ready to actually start writing an essay. (No, Facebook is not a necessary interruption-nor is a second breakfast. Finding quotations from scholarly articles and books to support your arguments before you actually start writing will make the actual process of writing much faster, as you will have fewer necessary interruptions. After all, what’s the point of writing a thesis if you can’t support it with research? Your research, including direct quotations from primary sources, should be part of your outline. This step should really be done in conjunction with the former step. Once you have these things, you basically have a road map to your final destination: completion of your essay. The key elements to have figured out before you begin writing are your thesis statement and the evidence and arguments you will be using to support that thesis statement. However, this is time that you will more than make up later in the writing process and that will ultimately improve your essay-writing speed. Just like any adventurous Took, you shouldn’t try to start writing an essay without first creating a map for yourself. Now, how would you rather make that journey: with a map or without one? I think we can both agree that using the map would save you quite a lot of time that would otherwise be spent wandering-right? Perhaps you’re even traveling to the Lonely Mountain to face a very vain dragon in hopes of reclaiming some treasure. But what I can actually do is teach you how to use less time to accomplish more when you’re writing an essay, which is pretty much exactly the same thing! So, if you’re feeling well fed and ready to learn, prepare yourself for an unexpected journey into the art of writing an essay as efficiently as possible. Not even Gandalf can manage that, and I’m certainly no Gandalf. If only there were some way to make writing an essay a faster process. Still, time is the important thing here, and it seems that neither students nor “hobbitses” (as Gollum would say) can ever get enough of it. ![]() Sure, in the scene above, Bilbo is at serious risk of being eaten by Gollum, while most students just have a lot of reading and essay writing to do. Time is what Bilbo begs for when he can’t solve Gollum’s riddle (right), the answer to the riddle being-of course-none other than time itself. What do most students have in common with Bilbo Baggins? Besides enjoying at least six meals a day, the trait most students share with our favorite hobbit is the desperate need they sometimes have for more time.
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