Napkins

Now, by this I don’t actually mean ‘rambling’ in the sense of romping through the countryside in woolly socks, shoes that are midway between boots and trainers and ‘britches’. I don’t even know what ‘britches’ are, nor do I own a kagoul, let alone the whole myriad of kagouls I’m sure are required to be an official amateur rambler. And then there’s the much greater problem of my absolute and terminal inability to navigate - maps are only slightly more impossible to read than they are to fold.

As the paragraph above illustrates more than adequately, I do know how to ramble - that tremendously useful skill of going on about nothing at all and in no particular order. Indeed if these things gained qualifications I could probably achieve an A* with very little effort at all. However, like all writing projects (blogs, essays, exams and so on), one has to start somewhere and in fact that is often the biggest challenge.

Staring at the blank screen / page / answer booklet can bring on a terrible sense of foreboding. There’s that feeling of dread that in an hour’s time, when the invigilator says ‘put down your pens please’, the page will still be as pristine as it was at the beginning, give or take the odd dot where you accidentally lost a grip of your pen, shortly before you lost a grip of your mind.

Marvellously, this is an entirely avoidable situation, because we all know how to ramble. It doesn’t even matter what we write either, not initially. If it’s an electronic document of some form we can go back and delete whatever waffle we began with - it might even be good enough to be spared the mighty chop, needing instead only a little editing to turn it into an introduction of beauty and worth.

In exams our delete button comes in the form of permission to cross stuff out. Examiners don’t generally look at the bits with lines through them, so the ‘wibble wibble wibble’ at the start won’t matter. Obviously we have to put the preciousness we afford presentation to one side to write something we know we may very well cross out later, but it doesn’t matter. The page is no longer blank and this in itself is a significant achievement.

If you’re doubting this is true, then try it. Start a new Psylent blog (or a new post if you’ve already signed up) right now, when you have nothing to say, then just type something, anything. The only rule I’d recommend is that you use real words and real sentences, but the content and meaning are not that important. You don’t even have to save it or publish it (although the random ramblings of psychology teachers and students en masse would be a Freudian paradise to read).

So, it would seem that my first post on Psylent is about exam tips, in a roundabout way. As with all exam tips, they work for some people and we should all try everything once. Well, everything except sky-diving without a parachute.

Comments are welcome - perhaps people would like to share their exam tips?