Saturday, July 18, 2009

Writing Essays

I'm freaking out a little bit. I have a 10-page paper due tomorrow night, and as of now, I have written a total of 1.5 pages. That's good, that's 1.5 pages up from last night. Usually I don't procrastinate this much. By this point, I would at least have a full outline, 3 pages or so done, and an idea of where I'm going. The problem is that I'm trying to juggle a (thankfully no longer full-time) internship, an online class that usually has homework due every single day (for which I am writing this paper), and a biochemistry class that packs a whole semester into 1/2 the time (for which I had a huge midterm just two days ago). Still, crap! How am I going to do this?!

Edit: Okay, evening of the same day. Now I still only have 3.5 pages done, but I'm feeling a lot better about this. I think it's partly because I've outlined it, but mostly because I didn't bother worrying about a thesis statement or topic sentences.

This is the way you're supposed to do things, I suppose, but I normally have some sort of thesis to begin with. I will almost always go back and change it, because I'll inevitably develop a better argument as I write, but I usually need something to point me in some direction at the beginning.

Nevertheless, I don't have one now. Perhaps I didn't need it because the prompt is both very structured and very open. It's structured in the sense that there are specific topics I need to talk about, but open-ended because it is somewhat a report and relies on my applying parts of those topics to my own observations. Wait, hmm...I guess that's kind of how a lot of essays are anyways (applying what you've learned), so maybe a guiding theme would have been useful.

Either way, it's too late now, and I'll just have to analyze the topics, then analyze my analyses so I can figure out what my point is.

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