I've done three practice questions for the written composition question in the B2 exam. The way I've been practicing them is to write out the full thing as quickly as possible without worrying about how messy it is, and the making a "neat" copy. By that I mean a slightly neater copy. My handwriting has never been neat! Maybe I should have applied to get special consideration so I could type the answer up instead of writing it by hand. That would only take me about 20 minutes...
Anyway, written it must be. So how should I approach it? I'm actually thinking that perhaps I should just write it out as rough notes and then expand on it neatly just once, checking each sentence as I go. The purpose of the first phase would be to get down all the points I need to cover. This should give me more time to just write neatly and check over my work. However, this also means that I wouldn't know how many words I'm going to write in advance.
One thing I want to be sure of is that I stick to the 180 word limit (roughly - less than 200 would be good) because, as long as I've covered all the required points, then the more words I write the more time I have to spend copying it neatly, and the more I have to check. I won't get extra points for writing 250 words, but the marker will deduct marks for mistakes made within those extra 70 words. At least, that's what I suspect. I haven't done any Goethe Institute classes (in fact, I've only ever done about 8 classes in 2010 and about as many about 20 years ago) and, especially, I haven't done any exam preparation classes. I suppose they might have been useful...
Anyway, I thought I'd note down roughly how long each part has taken me for the 3 handwritten practice questions I've done recently, just to get a clear idea in my head of how long it should take in the real deal. Here they are, in the order I did them:
Modellsatz Thema 2: 218 words, approx 48 mins (in 2 chunks) for rough draft. No neat copy made!
Modellsatz Thema 1: 219 words, 45 mins for rough draft, 17 mins for neat copy. I chopped one or two sentences as I was copying it as I was running out of time.
Uebungspruefung 1 (no longer available on Goethe website): 239 words, approx 37 mins for draft copy, 29 mins for neat copy and proof-reading.
You may have noticed that that last one adds up to 66 minutes, but you only get 65. What happened was that I fnished up, felt very pleased with myself, started proofreading and generally faffing about. Then I thought "maybe I'll check to see if I've answered all the parts". And guess what - I hadn't copied a whole paragraph! I went into panic mode and copied it out as best I could, although it was messy :-(
It's not the end of the world - actually I usually finish the second part of the schriftlicher Ausdruck section with a bit of time to spare (even though I don't get 100% on it!), so I won't run out of time, but there's an important lesson to be learned here - be bloody careful!
All of the above are also longer than they need to be. I definitely don't want to do anything more than 220, and would, of course, rather show everything the examiners are looking for in < 200 words, and give myself some time to at least find the obvious errors!
If you've done the B2 or the C1 exam before, how about leaving your strategies for dealing with these questions in the comments!
[EDIT: I just noticed that on page 41 of this B2 exam description there is an example of the level of writing expected. After a quick read, I notice that it's much simpler in terms of vocabulary and structure than what I've been writing, which is good news. I think I can safely focus on trying to eliminate errors and making sure I don't try to write anything so clever that I outwit myself!]
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