Arrgh! Writing papers is torture!

Usually my big problem is procrastination. If someone has a cure for that, please pass it along.

But tonight, I have spent three solid hours working. I have produced half a paragraph. I am trying to write one paragraph that summarizes the idea that a state’s legitimacy depends on it granting full political participation to its citizens. Why to I feel the need to read 20 articles on the subject instead of just writing? I just want to get this paper over with! Help!

I feel your pain. I’m an English major. :frowning:

I think I’ve got carpal tunnel syndrome from typing too many 90 bazillion page papers. I always put them off til the last second and end up getting no sleep. sigh It’s like they say, procrastination is like masturbation. It’s all well and good until you realize you’re just fucking yourself.

If you are stuck on a paragraph, skip it and come back to it: I almost always write my introductions last. Make sure you have some sort of working thesis (it dosen’t have to be phrased elegantly) and dive straight into the body.

Think of me naked when you write.

Oh, you wanted to stop procrastinating. Ignore the above.

I usually do what Manda Jo does, write the intro last, and get to work on the body of the paper first. Then touch up the beginning and you’re finished.

I found it was necessary for me to develop a process for writing. Both my undergrad and grad work in history was essentially writing a billion papers. I developed the process out of self-preservation.

Here’s my secret.

Read your source material. Write each source on an index card.

Every time you run across a fact or concept that belongs in your paper write it on another index card. Source the ‘fact’ card to the source card. (i.e. “Source 2: pp 25-27”)

When you’ve finished all your reading you should have a pile of source and fact/idea cards.

Arrange the cards in order that you think they should be presented in your paper.

Make each card a seperate paragraph and develop the paper.

That breaks the whole thing down into specific, easily attainable projects instead of one overwhelming one. It’s easy to write a single paragraph about one specific piece of evidence. It’s harder to try to approach the issue holistically.

Different things work for different people. If you’re not the superorganized type, then it might be helpful to first write all you know about a subject on a piece of paper, THEN organize it into paragraph form (rather than creating an outline and working from that). Sometimes this free-thinking approach allows one to develop new ideas along the way, as thoughts lead to other thoughts.

I’m having the same problem. I’m going the external studies route (I started college at age 36 - what in the hell was I thinking???) and have a whole bunch of papers to write. Five or six shorter ones that I can handle, but I also have a 20 page research paper to write. On whatever I want. It’s worth 2 credit hours out of my first six (my first “class” is a six credit hour class. It’s hard to explain.) Basically, it’s a huge part of my first class. I haven’t written anything remotely resembling “research” since I was 18. And even then it was doubtful. I can’t come up with a subject, I can’t come up with a thesis, I can’t even DEFINE thesis (well it isn’t THAT bad, but you get the picture), and I can’t get going on this. I’m stuck, I’m frustrated, and I’m ready to give up before I finish my first six credit hours.

But hey - let me know if you find anything that works! Maybe it’ll help ME! Yeah, THAT’LL happen. God, I am starting to feel like such a freakin’ failure. :frowning:

Sorry, I didn’t mean to whine to y’all - I’ll go sulk somewhere else.

If it makes you feel any better: I just received my first stack of papers to grade ever, and discovered that grading papers is also torture. About 10x harder than I expected. So the professor, if they’re anything like me and my fellow grad students (who all concur with me about how hard it is to grade papers) isn’t necessarily enjoying the process either.

I tried the index card method last time, and I decided it took up too much time. I always ended up going back to the sources when I wrote anyway. I also found it made the ideas disjointed, and I didn’t have a coherent argument running through the paper. A paper is more than the sum of its parts.

I started with the easiest part. I didn’t want to set the paragraph aside because I had spent three hours reading on the subject and would have forgotten my thoughts by morning. My real problem is that my standards are too high - I don’t want to say something unless I’m sure I’ve read everything on the subject, which is impossible. This is a 20-25 page, heavily researched (100-200 footnotes) paper. I have three more to write by mid-December. :eek:

Missy, whine away. That’s why I started this thread.

OH MY GOD. I just opened the paper, and I have no idea what happened, but the paragraphs I finally wrote last night are not there. IT’S ALL GONE.

Oh my god, chula, every student’s worst nightmare. I hope it miraculously reappears, or is found, or something of that nature.

I’m dealing with this at this very second. I’ve a paper due at 9:30 in the morning. . . and my brain is a big empty box. (Like it took writing a paper to figure that out.)

It’s just. . . nothing’s there! Argh!

I hate writing papers.

I use a system similar to Jonathan Chance. I took a writing seminar last year, and combined the methods (or at least when I’m “being good.” The method is basically to sit down and write. That sounds stupid, but really, it works. Hash out a very rough outline of your ideas, so that they’ll be in some semblance of order, then just sit down and spew forth onto the keyboard any thought on the subject that comes into your head. Don’t worry about mentally editing first. Writing is an iterative process, so get your ideas down, then prune them down to the best and most coherent later, during your editing process. Once you’ve read at least a minimal amount on your subject, you should be able to get a nice skeleton of a paper written. THEN go back and read up a little more. You’ll find that the supporting information in your sources jumps out at you, and is more apparent after you’ve got the basics down. This is where the note cards come in handy. You’ll know where each bit of info came from. It shouldn’t make your paper disjointed, since the broadest arguments in the paper should be yours, supported by your literature.

I’ve got programs to write for class. Ugh. LAB problem 3 is supposed to be turned in this week and im only 25% done with lab 1.

I’m also supposed to be makeing some charts or something. I might start that around 1 am.

mblackwell, are you at OSU?

I use a “system” sort of like fizgig’s that developed in a sort of ad hoc fashion, but seems to work pretty well for me. (I’m in grad school for English.) I leave out the actual cards, though I used to use them, and instead type my notes into my computer (documenting source and page for each, of course.) I type a lot faster than I write, and I like being able to copy-and-paste from notes to draft.

After doing bunch of reading and note-taking, I come up with a thesis, or at least a topic that I know has a thesis in it somewhere. Write that down.

Then I start writing. Anything. Notes, thoughts, complete sentences, drafts of my thesis statement, quotes that I think I’ll use in the paper and my analyses thereof, questions that I think of, etc. I do this on the computer, which makes it really easy to jump back and forth from one topic to the other (I try to keep relevant sections together). Questions and facts I don’t know go in bold type, e.g. “Pym written 150? years after Cook’s journals.” Sometimes I find areas that I need to research further, too.

After a while, I start to see the structure of my paper’s argument. So I type up an outline. I’m not obsessive about outlining each paragraph, but I do think it’s helpful for seeing how the argument progresses. So at this stage I have something might look kind of like this:

  1. Intro. Thesis statement.
  2. Pym. Narrative disruptions.
    a. journals
    b. factual/historical inserts
    c. introduction and appendix
  3. Scurvy.
    a. Lamb–physical/psych experience of South Seas
    b. But this ignores ENCOUNTERS
  4. Conclusion. Restate thesis. Further questions?

Now it’s time to write my first draft, which is basically a matter of C-&-P-ing my notes into a new document, organizing them according to my outline. Of course, I have to turn notes into complete sentences, and I always find that there’s at least area that requires further research. Although the actual crafting of prose at this point is hard work, I find struggling for the right words less unpleasant when I know where that passage fits into the architecture of the whole paper.

Umm, I’m also working on keeping research/reading journals for each project, because they’re helpful for longer, more research-oriented projects–basically, I just jot down what I looked at, how I found the source, and a few notes about the topic and its possible relevance to my project.

Chula, I hope your missing paragraphs are recoverable! That’s a nightmare!

Missy2U–I don’t know what “external studies” means, but do you have access to a campus? Because there’s probably a writing tutorial service, or a writing center, and I bet they can give you some ideas on how to plan the stages of your big paper–20 pages is a lot, but if you can break it down into steps it will be a lot easier to get going. The professor should be able to give you some help on where to start, as well. Oh, and reference librarians are your friends–at the school I did my undergrad degree, you could sign up for appointments for research help, and a reference librarian in the appropriate field would show you how to use both paper and electronic resources. I learned about all kinds of crazy stuff that I never would have found on my own, such as subject-specific bibliographies. Congrats on starting college at 36–that takes guts!

Jonathan Chance, your method sounds like a fabulous idea for keeping track of sources. I will be writing a thesis next year - a lab-based research thesis, but the first chapter has to be a comprehensive lit review. I think I might invest in some index cards.

chula, I do hope your paragraphs have not disappeared forever - that would be one of my worst nightmares.

Obviously, collecting information is important, but assuming that you have collected the information you find important…

Get something onto the page concerning your topic, even if it’s not well structured or even coherent. Once you have some semblance of the concepts of what you want to write about on the page, the writing process begins.

In my experience, the writing process begins when you get some ideas articulated on page/screen. Then you figure out which ideas are most important, where to place them in the overall paper, and how to articulate them.

If you have to, work on each idea separately, developing a fragmented sentence “idea” into a paragraph conveying your idea. Then work on another fragmented sentence into a paragraph, etc. Then see how these sentences work with each other. Cut things that don’t work, arrange ideas in what you think is the best order for the reader, and add things that make ideas work together.

As the overall paper develops, you will get those blessed revelations that will help to bring everything together. When I say “revelations” I don’t mean some sort of phenomenon reserved for those with divine madness; instead, it’s a recognition of how your paper should be structured to say what you want it to say and how you want to say it.

I also prefer to look at and edit hard copies of my own work, as I find it easier to find and note mistakes. I kill a lot of trees in my line of work just structuring my ideas on paper. Then I kill a lot of trees trying to word things as well as possible. While I am not necessarily an accomplished writer, I have never had any complaints from my work either :wink:

Ah writing papers = the devil.

The reason I really procrastinate until 3AM most of the time when writing english (in particular…I don’t really bother to write other papers…at least in HS I didn’t…until 5 mins before class) is because no matter how much or how little effort I put into the paper, I always get a B. That’s it.
So I feel like I might as well put no work into it because my grade won’t change.

My recent D- on a college paper might change my mind, though…ooog…I think i’ll start on the next paper a few days ahead of time…but that’s what I say now…

Basically, writing out a really rough draft is the best way to get going…just skip the into, like Manda JO suggested, and just write down thoughts in the body. Organize it later.

But you could try not listening to me…cause…I can’t write english papers…I’m alright at doing programming assignments, though.
That’s why I’m not a humanities major…

Listen to FNFR. That is outstanding advice.

Is it possible that you are trying to do it too well, or perfectly, and that this is what is stopping you? I only ask because I have seen students do this before.

–Professor Viva


I meant FNRFR. Sorry!

Mine are working on research papers now. I mean, they’re supposed to be.