It’s all about consistent effort. It’s not just you but I think everyone here hates writing extended English responses in timed conditions, on the spot, with a stimulus you won’t even know. (Unless you’re masochistic).
Honestly, the only way to prepare for this is simply just continually practice at home. There’s no other way to do it. I used to struggle so much with it but overtime it does get better. (I’m not sure about Years 9 to 10, but you should’ve gotten practice in writing responses in timed exam conditions, preparing you for Year 12). Otherwise, from here it’s just consistent study pattern by continually writing.
But obviously, this can’t be done straight away. You can’t run before you walk. So start slow and steady. Consistently practice writing a full response untimed. Do an “open book” exam in which you write responses but you can refer to source material. This should build your understanding of content and quickly allow you to ingrain your flow of reasoning/approach to the questions they could ask. With time, this because more memorable and you can come up with sentences at much faster speed.
Then I’d jump into a closed book exam but still untimed. Do not look at notes but just write a full essay on the spot with the content that you can remember. This forces you to recall stuff on your own and encourages you to think more on the spot. If you feel you’re writing sufficient amount, you can start timing yourself now.
Start with the general 40 minute timer for one response. Learn to pace yourself throughout the response consistently and always check the time. Don’t think about it too much, just write as you felt and as you did in the previous practice sessions. You should be able to establish a flow and you won’t have to think as deeply to come up with sentences. You’d be surprised how much you can write with this mindset. If you don’t make the 40 minute mark, finish the rest of your response and reflect on what went wrong. Where did you pause, and why did you pause? Most of the time, I bet it’s because you struggle with a certain topic so you don’t know how to string the words together. I’d recommend focusing on writing a good paragraph for that topic until you can write it perfectly. Continually do this until you can nail a good response in 40 minutes.
After this, I would continually practice repetitively and consistently. Decrease the time to 36 minutes and practice again but with different and more challenging questions. The 4 minutes extra allows for any planning you may have to adapt to the question in the real exam, as well as a good leeway to add more time into paragraphs you might not have finished.
And just some general tips, try to write tall and skinny as opposed to wide, it helps more with your writing speed. Shorten quotes or try to find quotes as short as possible, with high meaning. You can abbreviate quotes with ellipses and you should abuse this to extract the core meaning behind your quote. Try to look at your responses and remove anything irrelevant or can be shortened.
Most importantly, practice maybe once a week or fortnight. Ask your teacher to mark and consistently look for feedback. Hope this helps!
