By Hu Wo (Cuckoo's Song)
IN my examination experience, only 10 out of 100 students tend to answer essay question items in an exam. Though some students have estimated or even known the topics that will be asked in the examination, they show no interest in writing essay-type questions at all, especially those who are slow learners or less educationally expected students. It is no small wonder that most students do not want to answer an essay question type, just as such a question could do with any long-response answer. Still, there are found another reasons why students cannot write an essay quite well. However, the immense consequences of being able to write essays may be on students' other subject learning that is taught in the language of these essays. What kind of students in the world can compose an essay pretty well?
Honest to say, many highly intelligent students have a habit of creative writing or make an effort in this writing. The main reason is that they can pass an exam with their eyes closed by answering essay-type questions. Some students express interest only in science subjects, not in arts subjects. But they will be able to write an essay highly descriptively, possibly thinking that essay writing is an essential task, or it is not a kind of hair-splitting. They are strongly of the opinion that they can never write any essay topic with their eyes shut, with no prior practice or preparation for essay writing.
Some intelligent students absolutely wish to write an excellent essay as well as they are both taught writing by essay teachers and have studied as many sample essays as possible. That is, they have done enough study on essay writing. Since they want to create good essays, they must not have forgotten sample essays written by teachers or students of their same age. Some educators suggest that a normal student will be able to imitate students' essays, and more advanced students will have to study the teacher's essays. As far as I am concerned, students ought to follow the essay writing flow and teachers' essays will give colourful, higher thoughts, usages and sentence patterns to them. Without enough study on sample essays, any student will certainly be unable to write a standard essay in accordance with their grades by any means. Thus, higher-level students should be capable of writing a quality essay as per their respective educational levels.
Most students can write essays in name only, which means that they have a known vocabulary, usage and grammar, producing an average essay to some extent. Despite this, intelligent students are competent to compose the standardized essay simply due to their adequate writing practice. Of course, after they have learned vocabulary expressions or grammatical structures in a language, they will write an example sentence with these expressions or structures at once. Hence, these language learners will sooner or later arrive at productive writing of a great essay. That is much better – their sufficient writing exercises will hardly ever lead to misleading, aimless, meaningless, exaggerated essays for sure. Moreover, as much writing practice as possible should contribute to a beautiful essay rich in worthy subject matter and writing style. Needless to say, practice makes perfect. Having enough writing practice ought to give birth to flawless essays from the point of view of theme and syntax.
As I am aware, essay questions are not seen to be included in several language tests. In truth, a language test merely needs to examine linguistic skills rather than subject matter. Nevertheless, some examiners like to ask for more information from students in an exam, instead of language skills. Despite this, most intelligent students look forward to answering essay question items simply because essays are a subjective type of question in which they can show their utmost language skills, even if they could not get full marks from this question type. Really, only essay-type questions allow students to display most of their imagination and creativity in the language. But sad to say, many teachers do not include essay questions in a test that does not call for high marks, lest they find it difficult to draw their marking schemes. Clearly enough, talented students will write down an essay in the answer booklet, whatever type of essay question is included in a test. Then, their ability to write compositions will definitely improve, with the hope that they will choose an essay-item question in an exam for their academic achievement.
Quite unnoticeably, the consequences of being able to write essays are many. In the field of essay-type questions, there are two main kinds of questions based on how much the answer should be written down: short-response questions and long-response questions. Those questions are not the same as true-false items, blank items, multiple choice items and matching items. That is why all answers to essay-type questions must be completely written in the language. Therefore, if students know that language, they can write the answers to the questions on their own terms in one way or another. At such a time, the students will not have learnt their studies by rote or copy them down on answer sheets in the examination as they have done, but will show their second thoughts in their own words. So, these students with mastery and proficiency in the language will feel more at ease before, during and after exams than those who have learned the subject by heart. What is more, students who have a command of the language usually give as many reflections as necessary on the arts subject in particular, compared to those with a language barrier.
In conclusion, I would like to say that gifted students who actually desire essay writing can begin it with their textbooks if they do not have any books on essays. They can start studying how to organize a passage with what kind of ideas, opinions, vocabulary and grammar in used in the textbook. Generally speaking, a regular student must be able to write an essay similar to passages from the textbook by choice of words and functional language. And they ought to study and try essay topics related to textbook passages. After that, students have to practise an essay per week to a limited number of words, especially in the neighbourhood of 250 words, within the time taken, particularly about 30 minutes, without fail. Also, students should have done extensive reading so as to qualitatively and quantitatively write any essay topic that appears on the question paper. Finally, students need to conduct an inquisitive study on their nearby environment so that they will learn how to manipulate descriptive essays, the most difficult of essay types.
