How to Increase Writing Speed in Exam

In our age of digital technologies, most people go through life without writing anything by hand on a day-to-day basis, probably except for an occasional grocery list. We dont practice handwriting even students do most of their writing work using PCs and laptops, from doing their homework to making lecture notes. However, the Summary of Research Presented at Handwriting in the 21st Century states that the real benefits of writing by hand are: a brain activation, an impact on academic success and a foundation for reading, writing, language, and critical thinking. Most of the time our inability to write fast while retaining legibility isnt a big issue it is just a skill that has a very limited application in everyday life. The situation changes during the exams suddenly you have not just to write by hand but to do it quickly. Your fingers get tired, handwriting gets worse. You glance at the clock and see that you wont make it on time, you get more and more nervous, start hurrying, forgetting what you wanted to say and making a terrible mess. If it is a familiar situation, you dont have to be depressed there are ways to increase your overall writing speed without practicing day and night. Whats even better, there isnt much you can achieve by mechanical practice. You should understand that handwriting is very different from typing you cannot speed it up much by simply writing faster you can achieve much better results by learning to use your existing writing ability more efficiently. The Ability to Write Fast and Neat in Exams while Answering Questions An exam type you are most likely going to face in any discipline is writing freeform answers to a number of questions. Here are some tricks you can use to improve your writing speed: What Why Where possible, write in bullet points instead of paragraphs. It gives you a legitimate reason to write in a fragment, concentrating on the most important aspects of the question and omitting less crucial ones. You don’t have to think of logical connections between sentences. You are less concerned with the style of your answers and aren’t tempted to get back to the question once you’ve finished with it. Divide your effort depending on the number of marks. Questions have a varying number of marks assigned to them (usually from 1 to 10). You should always start with the most valuable ones, answer them if possible and progress to the less valuable ones, dedicating a reasonable amount of time to each of them. 1-point questions aren’t worth spending ten minutes writing them up – even if you have time to spare, you can probably better apply it elsewhere. Don’t be in a hurry. If you get nervous and try to finish every question as quickly as possible, it will harm both your handwriting and your overall speed writing. You won’t be able to think clearly, make a lot of mistakes, get back to the question later on and waste more time on corrections than if you write carefully and think things through from the outset. Aim at using 1 page per answer, as paper isn’t usually an issue during the exams. Not only your answers will look neat separated this way, but you also get an opportunity to write short using schematic bullet points for answers to all questions and get back to them to elaborate later on if time allows. Take part in mock exams. It is the only way to get the real feelings of how much time you have and how many minutes you can dedicate to each particular question. Express information graphically where possible. Graphs, charts, diagrams, tables etc. not just allow you to illustrate your answer and express in a few strokes that, otherwise, would’ve taken a couple dozen words but makes your answers stand out from the bulk as well.The Ability to Write an Essay Fast in an Exam Not all disciplines require you to write essays, but for those that do, this kind of work is responsible for a lot of credits. Learning how to write a good essay neatly will go a long way toward ensuring your academic success. Here are a few ways to help you do it successfully: #1 Write essays in the exam environment simulated by yourself You will be surprised how many students try everything when preparing for their exams but a practice is obvious. Find or create the exact conditions of your future exam: find out how much time you will be given, whether there is going to be a word limit, what questions and prompts were used for this exam in the past and so on. Then sit down and write an essay simulating these conditions as closely as possible. Besides, youll manage to note how much time you need to write a an essay of a particular size. #2 Start with an outline It may be almost physically painful to spend precious minutes on anything, but on actual writing during your exam, but trust us: every minute you spend planning and preparing an outline is likely to save you ten minutes later on. Enumerate all main and supporting points, set the order in which they will be mentioned, how your introduction will be tied together with the conclusion and so on or at least mark them with keywords so that you dont forget anything. #3 Avoid perfectionism It is a good idea no matter what kind of writing you do, but it is really important when your time is limited. Dont overthink it your job is to write as quickly and clearly as possible, not to write a masterpiece for the ages. Get your point across and dont correct things youve already written unless youve clearly made a mistake. #4 Decide on the structure of your essay in advance This trick is useful because it creates boundaries for you to work in and doesnt allow your mind to run wild when you are hit with an unexpected topic. If you decide beforehand that your essay will have exactly 5 paragraphs irrespectively of its topic, when you are given the task, you simply have to fill in this mold with your writing without creating an amorphous piece of text. Without any doubt, using these tricks wont magically turn you into a master writer overnight but they will certainly boost your chances of getting through your exams successfully. They mostly deal with an organization but if you know that it is your poor handwriting skills that cause problems, it may be a good idea to apply to the practical guidance Better handwriting for adults by Meliosa Bracken and Pam Buchanan.

Newly liberated people Essays

Newly liberated people Essays Newly liberated people Essay Newly liberated people Essay What small prospects for success would face a society which openly announced its intention of imposing a second imperial tutelage on a newly liberated people?   -Mass Communications and American Empire  In many respects, the second Bush administrations efforts at information control are too heavy-handed for the late Herbert Schillers subtle model of mind mold. From Lynne Cheneys American Council of Trustees and Alumni to John Poindexters Total Information Awareness, 43 makes no bones about a hyper-patriotic process of inculcation in the service of a powerful ruling class. What is unusual, as a feature article this month in the Connecticut Law Tribune avows, is the extent to which President Bush and Attorney General Ashcroft are the chief cheer-leaders in this movement, equating legitimate dissent with supporting terrorism.While Schiller is no longer here to parse current events, he might be surprised at the extent to which the notion of a veritable carpet-bombing of the public consciousness informs todays critical literature. Indications of a political economy at work in the newsroom abound, from outspoken Tom Guttings dismissal from the Texas Sun within two weeks of 9/11 to Exxon Mobils withdrawal of support for PBS announced last month2. And Schiller could easily explain the FCCs new quest to regulate the Internet backbone (so that we can limit any service disruption in these troubled times) or The Rendon Groups no-bid contract with the Pentagon (to help the Joint Chiefs achieve their policy objectives). Even the five networks agreement to censor videotapes of Osama bin Laden reminded observers that, For some time, communications and space satellites have been providing intelligence that is of great tactical value in what is now euphemistically called counter-insurgency.3 Bin Laden does not have the capabilities for an operation of this magnitude, Egyptian journalist Mohammed Heikal told The Guardian, in October 2001. When I hear Bush talking about al Qaeda as if it were Nazi Germany or the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, I laugh because I know what is there. Bin Laden has been under surveillance for years: every telephone call was monitored and al Qaeda has been penetrated by American intelligence, Pakistani intelligence, Saudi intelligence, Egyptian intelligence. They could not have kept secret an operation that required such a degree of organization and sophistication. Here at home, where police and the military trained their electronic eyes on protesters at Ws inauguration, Schillers predicate marriage of economics and electronics goes largely ungoverned.5 Video surveillance and facial recognition are easy to sell to a public more paranoid than ever before about terrorists, murderers, rapists, child molesters, cop killers, robbers, and prison escapees in our midst. What could be less objectionable than catching terrorists?6 Schiller would appreciate the forthcoming bailout in the name of homeland security of the telecoms industry, which by 1966, he wrote, had morphed from being an essential support to our international activities to being an instrument of foreign policy. In the meantime, Lewis Lapham believes, foreign policy has become a cash cow for our politicians friends in the defense industry-with predictable results. The attack was an attack on American foreign policy, he said a year after 9/11, which for the last 30 years, had allied itself, both at home and abroad, with despotism and the weapons trade, a policy conducted by and for a relatively small cadre of selfish interests. Quoting George Ball, who extolled MNCs as the engines that give thrust to American expansionism, Schiller cynically agreed that the power structure found few things more hopeful for the future than the growing determination of American business to regard national boundaries as no longer fixing the horizons of their corporate activity.9 Juergen Habermas made this now-common knowledge his point of departure two months after 9/11. Instead of a globalization that consists of a market without boundaries, he told an audience of German publishers and booksellers awarding him a peace prize, many of us hope for a return of the political in another form. Not in the original form of a global security state, tied to the spheres of the police, intelligence services and now even the military, but instead as a worldwide, civilizing power of formation. Today, the language of the market penetrates every pore and forces every interpersonal relation into the schema of individual preference. The social bond, however, is based on mutual recognition and cannot be reduced to the concepts of contract, rational choice and the maximization of utility.  Finally, we find echoes of Schillers ideological quandary in contemporary efforts to understand our national dilemma The cultural puzzle that remains is why Congress and Americas citizens, given the opportunity to dissent, instead consented to Bushs new doctrine of pre-emptive war to be undertaken by the president entirely at his discretion.For fellow theorist J. Michael Sproule, the popular quiescence is no mystery. Any explicit statements that the Administration makes against dissent, he writes, are relatively minor elements in the panoply of a cultural propaganda of war and crisis. Propaganda in an open-information system works best when people are induced to acquiesce without immediate pressure. The key element in the Bush Administrations public-opinion campaign RE the Iraq war is Bushs having assumed a general mantle of a War President, extending an immediate, yet diffuse, crisis of terrorism to a wide-ranging program of confronting selected unfriendlies. From this fundamental position, the Administration has made it difficult for opponents to establish a basis for an effective challenge. The vagueness of the crisis, combined with its having been framed as a War, induces avoidance on the part of the public and self-censorship on the part of opinion leaders. And everything feeds into what de Tocqueville observed as a cultural trait of Americans to praise the abstract idea of free speech but to shrink from articulating opinions that they believe may not be universally shared.

Outfoxed Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism Essay

Outfoxed Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism - Essay Example Indeed, as the former Fox News correspondent, Jon Du Pre, asserted, "We are not so much a news-gathering organization as we are a proponent of a point of view" (cited in "Outfoxed"). As the highly biased proponents of a particular point of view, Conway, Grabe and Grieves (2007) contend that the network does not only display a blatant disregard for media ethics but outright disrespect for the truth. It is this disrespect for the truth which is at the core of Fox News' failure to inform its viewers that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq and that much of the global community is opposed to this war. Indeed, a polling of Fox News viewers evidenced that, several years into the war, more than a third believed that WMDs had been found in Iraq and that the international community, including the Iraqi people themselves, are supportive of the United States' war (Conway, Grabe and Grieves, 2007). This amply evidences the extent to which the mass media can manufacture truth, irres pective of facts. The film establishes the degree to which Fox News distorts reality and obfuscates the truth.