After nearly a year of letting my brain atrophy, I finally gathered myself to write a 1500-word, 5-page paper. It was not an easy task, because I didn't know what made me tick previously. Only upon further reflection did I realize that there were some strategies I could've employed to get myself started earlier.
So, here are my tips for "forcing out" the first drafts of essays:
1. Outline your essay. It's as simple as writing out the points you're going to talk about and naming an example to support it. This is easy if you're given a prompt and all you have to do is to respond to it. But what if there's no prompt, and you have to formulate your own thesis statement?
2. If there's no prompt, and you have no idea where to start, just write a general introduction of the topic. Intros tend to start off with a broad view before you narrow your focus. So, write something generic (you can always edit this later) and see what sort of thesis statement your writing naturally brings you to. Then attempt to sketch out an outline of your essay with that. If you don't seem to be getting anywhere, start again, but tweak the words and see where that lands you. Repeat until you feel comfortable with your essay outline.
Remember this: Your gut instinct tends to be right. You will know, deep down inside, whether you'll eventually be able to "force" however many words/pages you need out of that sketch you just did, based on previous experience. (This assumes you've done academic writing before; if you haven't, your topic tends to be of the "prompt" kind, so you don't have to worry about this anyway).
3. Forget about breaking the essay up into tiny little pieces. Have you ever heard the advice to write 100-200 words whenever you can, just to make progress on your essay? Maybe this works for some of you, but for most, it just makes your essay sound disjointed, both in content and style. The fact is, you aren't going to be able to concentrate and come up with something innovative in that half hour between PE and dinner. Your brain needs to be "in the zone".
So: set aside large chunks of time to work on the essay. Instead of squeezing in four half-hour sessions, clear 2 hours of your time. During that two hours, sit down and squeeze that essay out of your head. You'll find that, once you get started, your ideas come much more easily, and the end result will be a more coherent, flowing essay.
4. While working on your essay... remove distractions. Turn off the internet, and more importantly, make it difficult for yourself to get back on the internet. If you need to research articles, do it before working on the main body of your essay. We all think we can multitask, but really, Facebook and MSN are far too addictive.
5. Make your habits (good or bad) work for you, rather than trip you up. What do I mean by this? Well, let's look at me. I'm extremely lazy in a physical sense. I don't like to have to get up and go somewhere, and I'd rather just sit in my seat if I can. So what I did was to shift myself to my bed (I'm good at resisting the temptation to just fall asleep, so this works for me, but it might not work for you), bringing my laptop and reading materials with me. I bought a wireless router but was too lazy to install it, so I'm stuck with my ethernet cable at my desk. Thus, being on my bed directly prevents me from using the internet because I'm far too lazy to heave myself off and bring everything back to the desk. And being stuck there, unwilling to move, did wonders for my concentration (and motivation).
6. Know your limits. Everyone takes a different amount of time to write the same length of paper. For me, 1500 words with a standalone prompt might take me 1.5 hours. But 1500 words with a reference (e.g. Comment on this article...) would take me 2.5 hours. And 1500 words with multi-article referencing (usually research/expository papers) might take me 3-4 hours to finish. If you know how long you take to complete the paper, you'll have a better idea of how much time to set aside.
7. Do not underestimate the reference section. It takes longer to write up references in the correct citation style than you think. Formatting also takes up a huge amount of time when you're trying to make sure the spacing and style of different text elements are consistent.
8. Finally, know your most productive time. Unfortunately for me, I tend to write better essays when I'm in a panic-induced focus between 10pm to 2am. This is probably due to a number of bad habits, but it works for me. Before my most productive time, I try to lay some groundwork on the essay (sketch the outline, write the intro, etc), so that I can focus on the actual writing during that time. Some of you work better by splitting the essay into 3 main chunks and doing one chunk per day. Some work better just setting aside 6 hours and head-bashing through the entire essay. It's up to you. Discover what works best.
That's all I have to say today. Cheers from Berkeley.
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