WRITING LONG PAPERS

Long essays are a chore, but you can make it easier for yourself with these few tips.

Planning

The first thing you should do when assigned a long essay is plan out the timing for completion. Get the information about the due date and check-in/revision times so that you can map out a loose schedule for when you'll work on the project. Cut it into stages: creating a thesis and list of general points, research gathering, drafting, and revision for final submission.

Information Gathering

After creating a plan for the paper, decide the general focus of the paper. From there, you can start gathering your research to support your thesis and main points. Having most of the necessary data for the paper will make it much easier to write. Make sure your sources are legitimate, and create your works cited page as you find sources that are useful to you (then you won't have to worry about it later). The library has lots of sources available for different kinds of topics, and is on this blog's Resources page. Citation machine is helpful for creating Works Cited pages if you don't want to write it all out yourself.

Writing

At this stage, you don't need to worry about how everything sounds; you can fix flow and phrasing later. For now, focus on building a concrete argument that supports your thesis. As you write, create your in-text citations so that you don't have to struggle to find quotes again later. Purdue Owl is very helpful if you need to know how to cite different kinds of sources, and can be found on this blog's Resources page. If you struggle to start papers, leave enough time that you can spend one session writing just the introduction paragraph. That'll make it feel like you've already begun, so the task is less daunting. Focus on how well you're arguing your point, not your word count, so that your focus is on making a good paper----the word count won't be as much of a problem then. Another helpful way to start is using Calmly Writer, a free site that makes it easier to focus on your writing by allowing you to have a truly empty page instead of the crowding Microsoft Word options.

Revision

By this stage you should just be checking for grammatical errors, poor phrasing, and any other formatting or clarity issues. Leave at least a few hours (a day is better) before you do this step, so that mistakes are easier to catch. There are plenty of free sites available for checking phrasing like Hemingway App.

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