ECPE, Michigan Proficiency- ESSAY WRITING TIPS welcome to real English online and today we're back with ECP proficiency Michigan and we're going to be looking at the writing part of the exam so this is going to be a quick video to give you some tips and facts about the writing and to try and help you boost your marks alright so let's have a look at the facts about the writing okay so hopefully if you're taking this exam within the next month you already know these what you should do alright so first of all the first tricky thing about this exam is you only have 30 minutes to do your essay all right which is not a lot all right as you'll see in a minute now get back to this in a minute so 30 minutes is all you have and they're very strict with their time all right you have a choice of two why michigan essayquestions which is kind of nice of them it gives you a you know so if one of them is absolutely horrible or you really don't like the topic at least you have an option to do another one which is fairly you know reasonable of the money okay you have to write in pencil just a little fight so all those people who loved writing in pens have to write in pencil so get used to it now you are instructed to write one and a half to two pages all right so they don't actually give you a word limit but proficient proficiency generally you're expected as I've said here about 250 to 300 words yeah so they give you an a4 piece of paper yeah like this all right and you meant to do a page and a half of that so that's quite a lot of writing which brings me back to my first point and you've got to do this in 30 minutes all right that's no easy task you will lose marks if you write less than this okay so if you give then half a page or 3/4 of a page unless you're writing is I have had a student and her writing was she could literally write me half page and every 300 words there but you needed a magnifying glass to read your writing but it depends on the size your writing but most of us say you're writing 8 to 10 words per line like most humans out there you're gonna have to write a page and a half to two pages yep your writing must be legible now some people have a real problem with this legible means obviously the examiner needs to read it so you can't write like a drunken spider all right you are not graded on how your composition looks however so maybe your writing is a little messy you know you're not going to lose marks for this they say however the examiners I think are human and if you're like me or like any other human out there we tend to judge things on appearance so if you have a nice sexy essay that is written nice and neat and tidally it's going to make a good impression whereas if you have an essay which is all scribbled out and crossed out and messy handwriting straight away the examiners going to go ah ah you're making his job or her job very difficult all right so I do think presentation is important and for those of you with bad handwriting it's something that you really need to work on yes again you're under pressure you've got 30 minutes and this means even the best of us kind of go and just come in let rip alright but you got to make it legible yeah all right so on we go here are some tips for you alright read the questions very very very very very very very carefully and I say this because one of the most common reasons why people fail the writing part of the exam is because they don't answer the question and if you don't answer the question it doesn't matter how good your English is you're going to lose a lot of marks for content and the examiner won't be able to give you content marks okay if you don't answer the question and the danger is if you've been preparing for this exam and you've been writing lots of essays you may have written similar essays on a similar topic or on the same topic and the trap is that you start you know writing the same things and every essay is different there's a different emphasis okay and so you really have to spend time you know reading the question and actually asking yourself what exactly is this question asking of me what should I include what you're like what should I exclude it's very important okay choose the best question and be decisive as my second tip now this may seem logical but I've had students in machs and they sit there and they get you know 10 minutes in and then you see them going oh ah I said what's wrong and they say I'm starting this question and now I think I prefer the other essay you know like ah okay they've just wasted a lot of their time all right you really have to think carefully about what you've got ideas for what you've got a vocabulary for and which one you're more confident in writing all right be decisive take your time read both questions fully and make a informed decision spend time brainstorming and organizing your ideas all right now this is very important once again it comes back to the fight and it's understandable people have 30 minutes and because of that they're like they're under pressure now and they just start writing no no no never do that okay this is a proficiency exam okay your writing has to be organized all right you have to organize things logically and this means that you really should organize your work and have ideas before you start writing now there may be those of you out there who can just do it like that good for you excellent if you're happy doing it like that way by all means continue doing it that way but personally I always brainstorm ideas and what this means is you sit there and you think okay this idea is going to go here and you actually do a skeleton essay and in fact there's going to be a video about writing essays and more about skeleton essays and things like that but generally it's just do a plan so you know which ideas are going in which paragraph you can write down some words that you want to include and again you'll see I've written three to four minutes yeah so don't spend 10 minutes piling your essay I would say you know no longer than four minutes but you should do this for sure all right and if you have time which a lot of you may not and by all means don't panic if for example maybe you've just started your conclusion and the examiner says okay thank you very much guys put your pencils down please and they come and take your paper and you're not finished just because you don't finish your essay does not mean you're not you're going to fail or anything like that okay you can still get a very very high mark the examiner is going to be looking at certain things and again there's going to be an annotation for a link where I'm going to be talking about what the examiners are looking for all right although you can find this to be honest in any East the test book they go through the bands band five and four and three and two and one but I'll simplify it for you or try do all right so if you have time check for errors as well and finally remember to practice your essays all right practice makes perfect you should be finding essay topics and practicing them writing them in 30 minutes all right because if you need one hour you obviously need a lot more practice all right so practice makes perfect all right so I hope this is being useful for you guys if there's any questions or perhaps any essays that you've seen that you just have no idea how to go about answering them get in touch and we'll you know we'll brainstorm some ideas together all right thank you very very much for watching that's all for now fine
