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How to write an article in one night

Being in college is a chore. It takes a lot of work, carefully planned over the course of a week, a month, or a quarter to make sure everything is done with all the attention it deserves… are you laughing yet? No one puts in the “required” time to properly complete their college work. No, more of a rush at the end every week or two to complete a 10 page paper or learn 200 years of ancient Roman history overnight. You all do it, I did it. It’s probably a better training skill than all the random stuff you “learn”, because honestly, in real life, do you think you’ll have time to sit down and schedule everything that comes into your life in advance? Yes… I thought not.

Regardless, for those of you who have just entered college because of the snoring boredom and ease of high school, you probably aren’t incredibly prepared for the sheer amount of work you’ll have to cram out at the last second. I’m not saying it’s easy just because you’re going to procrastinate. No, it’s still hard. You really should take the time to do your job properly. You just won’t, so you have to learn to procrastinate. It is a fine art, in which I feel that I have become a kind of Renoir.

First, make sure you have all your books and notes. If you don’t make it to class, which is most likely for procrastinators, make sure you get them from a classmate. Also, double check and make sure your professor doesn’t have a website. Usually they’ll tell you, but more than once I’ve found lecture notes in an archive online, especially now that 90% of them put everything they teach you into PowerPoint presentations and then read it to you during an hour every day. day (yes, lazy). They usually only need an extra 30 seconds out of their day to get things online, and then when they get over twenty emails a week asking for class notes, they just have to point you to the website. Well, some are a bit more joking about their students not even bothering to come to class and not openly offering said grades. However, for sick students and such, they will put them online to save paper and all it takes is a couple of quick Google searches or an email to a sick student and you have your notes. Or… just ask a classmate. But then you’re trusting them to actually pay attention.

You should have your books too. If you’ve never bothered to buy them because you’d just take notes or go into Sparknotes, then you’d better go buy them, because BSing your way through a document will require at least some resources. You can’t magically determine information just by being around smarter people. School would be so much easier if that were the case.

So, sit down and start reading. Yes, you are going to be reading a lot the night before your work is due. But this is better than doing all the assigned reading, because now you are looking for specific information. Instead of general learning (which would just stick around and mess up your brain later), you’re doing directed research. An eighth of the time, and none of it bothers to remember. You should have your theme at least. If not, start browsing the message boards and get one from someone smarter than you. However, never accept his job. The last thing you need is to get kicked out of school for plagiarism. It’s lazy and embarrassing. Steal concepts, but never words. And if you steal a concept from half of his work, cite it. Your university will not take kindly to cheating. You’ll be so entangled and blacklisted that you might as well go and get an application at Jack in the Box, and trust me, you don’t want to work in fast food.

You can’t procrastinate now. You’ve been doing that for three weeks, so I’m sorry (I know it hurts), but in terms of actual physical writing time, you’ll need at least three hours to write your paper, which is not to speak of writing it. And writing it involves finding quotes and that annoying task of thinking. Sit down, grab an energy drink and a bag of chips, close the door, and put on some headphones. No tv, and put your phone on the charger. Now open your word processor and start typing.

You probably think you have writer’s block. But writer’s block has nothing to do with not having a clue what you’re talking about. You’re stuck with the second one right now, so keep reading on your topic and find fragments to put together.

What most people don’t realize here is that the standard writing process is not in effect for you. You are not drafting, or brainstorming. That’s what you should have done two weeks ago. No, you are writing your article, so make sure you have your idea and just start writing and keep writing until you create a thesis somehow.

I usually start as broadly as possible and start talking about something. If I write about the hero’s quest for Pip in Great Expectations, I start by talking about Greek mythology and the origin of the classic hero. Moving on, I’ll talk about the modern hero, then the alterations made in the industrial age and how Dickens rewrote archetypes for his comedy, and finally I’ll start talking about Pip. By now you should have a general idea of ​​what you mean. It may be general, but you’ll clarify it in the next few paragraphs, and then you’ll come back and rewrite the first paragraph.

Paragraph one is almost always rubbish. Especially with this method, because your tired and angry professor after reading 30 of these beautiful last-minute essays will put a big red X on everything that doesn’t have to do with your work, and those first few sentences are completely unrelated.

But now you can start stealing from the text. Hook a date and make a point. Grab another quote and make another point. If your thesis ends up being something incredibly broad and pointless like “Pip’s quest from anonymity and futility to a position of wealth and power in London mirrors classic hero quests, but works through Dickensian visions of industrial England” , it’s still good. It sounds smart and promises a lot. Now just find specific quotes and build a narrative. Start at the beginning of your change, talk about your childhood, then go to when you change, then compare to the hero quests of yesteryear, then show how they are different.

Almost any document, if written quickly, can be reduced to something simple and incredibly easy to write, compare and contrast. You choose a prominent topic from the book you just “read.” Find a font that reflects or better yet thwarts this theme and compare the two. However, don’t just list how they differ. That’s high school stuff right there. You will want to write down exactly how the external source changes what you think of your book. It sounds difficult, but just think about it. You have Great Expectations. It has a main character who goes on a kind of quest. You now have a classic archetype from which there are hundreds of sources for inspiration. You take a basic outline of this archetype and apply it to the search for Pip and how it fits and when it doesn’t fit. Now finish your essay by describing why sometimes it doesn’t fit. Which brings you back to the Dickens opinions part. You just wrote an article saying that Pip’s quest is classic but different because Dickens was writing about a different time in human history. Incredibly simple; You’re not telling anyone anything new, but three things will guarantee a good grade.

1. If you write well at all. You have to be a halfway decent writer, and if you’re in college I’ll assume you are.

2. Professors love external references. Show initiative and investigation and make it look like you did extra work (which you didn’t). I wrote articles overnight with no drafts and no re-reading and getting feedback that I must have spent hours working on them. Not quite.

3. Confidence in your affirmations. Say everything with absolute certainty and back it up with a quote. Do this enough and even if you’re wrong, it will look like you’ve made a decent point, which earns you brownie points.

Writing an article is a tumultuous task, but it is also a scalable task that can be done incredibly quickly and easily if you know how to do it. In my penultimate term of college, I wrote three papers in two days; two of them 10 pages and one 25 pages, and they got a 3.8 and two 3.7s. It’s a matter of trust and, above all, absolute courage to be incredibly lazy.

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