It’s that time of year again; exams are looming and students are looking for top exam technique tips to help them really make the most of the revision they have done when they get into the exam room. Essay writing itself is a skill with many techniques, but exam essay technique has several important differences – writing a long essay over several days with your texts in front of you is quite a different matter than trying to cram in all the facts you have learned into a single exam essay in a one or two hour paper.

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Virtual learning environments or course management systems have become popular with many higher education colleges. A software package can be used by thousands of educational bodies worldwide (e.g. Blackboard is used by over 3700 colleges and other educational bodies). These systems provide software which tutors can use to upload course information and the more sophisticated platforms allow tutors to set up a forum for each course, so that classmates can discuss the course or essay writing remotely.

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While you are writing essays it is useful to have some reference books to hand. Although there is a great deal of material online to help with general reference queries, websites are not always reliable. It pays to have some decent reference books. Some of these will be available to borrow from the local library or university library, so that you can try them out and see which titles you prefer. However, in time you will probably want to buy several of these. Below we deal with some of the general language texts that can help you with your writing and essay proofreading.

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One top essay writing tip is to use hedging. In your writing, ‘to hedge’ means that you protect yourself from criticism by using language that doesn’t commit you firmly to a particular point of view.

This means you use words and expressions like “It may be”, “Mitchell’s work appears to say”, “It could be concluded that”. Academic writers use careful words so that they don’t make claims that are definite when the evidence is uncertain. This may be particularly useful when you want to criticise another writer’s work. You don’t want your assertion that their work is wrong to sound like a personal attack, so writing something like “Mitchell’s work seems to ignore the changing economic circumstances” is not as combative as “Mitchell’s work completely ignores the changing economic circumstances”.

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It’s that time of year again; exams are looming and revision is your highest priority. But don’t forget, just learning the facts isn’t enough to score you the high marks you deserve. It’s also crucial to spend some time brushing up your exam essay writing technique, to save valuable minutes when you are under time pressure and stop you from panicking when you get into the exam room.

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