One Year Down, ?? To Go
My Junior English class was a success. Now I am, Glory Hallelujah! and Praise God!, done with my English requirements. Other than learning the MLA format and documentation style, I still don’t really feel like I know how to write papers.
I was recently talking with someone that said they cannot write a paper without having an outline. Someone else said they write their paper and pull the outline from the written paper. I’m not sure if I can even do a proper outline. Luckily, I didn’t have to submit an outline with my research paper. My paper-writing process is much more disjointed than I’m sure it should be, having just completed my English requirements.
My research paper was written over the course of five days. I spent a lot of time prior to writing it researching gambling and looking for better sources. I started writing the paper on Sunday evening. I wrote on Monday evening, Tuesday evening, Wednesday from around 2:00 to midnight, and was still tweaking it periodically on Thursday at work before turning it in on Thursday evening. When I write a paper, I have to write for a while and then just walk away from it to clear my head before having another go at it. After writing my rough draft, I started a new document and cut and pasted from the old document, rearranging and editing and tweaking all the while to come up with a hopefully passable paper. I would estimate that I had between 18-22 hours in that paper.
My presentation was, well, kind of off the cuff. I never thought that I’d pretty much wing it for a presentation but that’s exactly what I did. I had made some note cards with some points I wanted to be sure and make but I just got up and started talking. Oh, and the overhead that I used? About ten minutes before I left for class, I composed a list of the bad things that come from gambling, both winning and losing, and printed it about 5 minutes before I left for class. I sure was hoping the ink was dry when I packed it up.
We all had to write a little blurb critiquing our classmates’ presentations. The young kid sitting to my left side left his tablet open on his desk when we had a break and I could read his comments about my presentation. “Seemed kinda tense, but was still interesting,” he wrote. Uh, yeah! “Kinda tense” would be putting it kindly. I could feel that my face was, oh, probably cherry colored, but how in the world can a person control that?? And the tremor in my voice?? Public speaking is not my love language at all. In spite of my deficiencies in public speaking, I managed to get a perfect score on my presentation (shows how easy she was on us). Everyone seemed interested in the subject, particularly in the examples that I gave, and we had a nice little discussion after I was finished with my presentation. Overall, I was satisfied with it. Oh, if you ever want to read up on gambling or need a source, I would recommend Gambling in America by Earl L. Grinols.
At the break, some of us were discussing how we go about writing our papers. A lot of them waited until the day/night before it was due to write their papers. I would consider myself to be a procrastinating perfectionist. The guy sitting just to my right said that he too is a procrastinating perfectionist. In fact, he started writing his paper at 10 PM on Wednesday night and wrote until 7 AM. He had to be at work at 8 AM and worked until it was time to come to class. He admitted to falling asleep several times during his 30-minute drive to class. The poor guy thought that the paper had to be 10-15 pages long instead of 7-10, so he ended up writing a much longer paper than he needed to write. Maybe I'm not as much of a procrastinator as I thought. I just hope that I never have to pull an all-nighter because I don’t think I could do it.
And so ends my first year of college.
I was recently talking with someone that said they cannot write a paper without having an outline. Someone else said they write their paper and pull the outline from the written paper. I’m not sure if I can even do a proper outline. Luckily, I didn’t have to submit an outline with my research paper. My paper-writing process is much more disjointed than I’m sure it should be, having just completed my English requirements.
My research paper was written over the course of five days. I spent a lot of time prior to writing it researching gambling and looking for better sources. I started writing the paper on Sunday evening. I wrote on Monday evening, Tuesday evening, Wednesday from around 2:00 to midnight, and was still tweaking it periodically on Thursday at work before turning it in on Thursday evening. When I write a paper, I have to write for a while and then just walk away from it to clear my head before having another go at it. After writing my rough draft, I started a new document and cut and pasted from the old document, rearranging and editing and tweaking all the while to come up with a hopefully passable paper. I would estimate that I had between 18-22 hours in that paper.
My presentation was, well, kind of off the cuff. I never thought that I’d pretty much wing it for a presentation but that’s exactly what I did. I had made some note cards with some points I wanted to be sure and make but I just got up and started talking. Oh, and the overhead that I used? About ten minutes before I left for class, I composed a list of the bad things that come from gambling, both winning and losing, and printed it about 5 minutes before I left for class. I sure was hoping the ink was dry when I packed it up.
We all had to write a little blurb critiquing our classmates’ presentations. The young kid sitting to my left side left his tablet open on his desk when we had a break and I could read his comments about my presentation. “Seemed kinda tense, but was still interesting,” he wrote. Uh, yeah! “Kinda tense” would be putting it kindly. I could feel that my face was, oh, probably cherry colored, but how in the world can a person control that?? And the tremor in my voice?? Public speaking is not my love language at all. In spite of my deficiencies in public speaking, I managed to get a perfect score on my presentation (shows how easy she was on us). Everyone seemed interested in the subject, particularly in the examples that I gave, and we had a nice little discussion after I was finished with my presentation. Overall, I was satisfied with it. Oh, if you ever want to read up on gambling or need a source, I would recommend Gambling in America by Earl L. Grinols.
At the break, some of us were discussing how we go about writing our papers. A lot of them waited until the day/night before it was due to write their papers. I would consider myself to be a procrastinating perfectionist. The guy sitting just to my right said that he too is a procrastinating perfectionist. In fact, he started writing his paper at 10 PM on Wednesday night and wrote until 7 AM. He had to be at work at 8 AM and worked until it was time to come to class. He admitted to falling asleep several times during his 30-minute drive to class. The poor guy thought that the paper had to be 10-15 pages long instead of 7-10, so he ended up writing a much longer paper than he needed to write. Maybe I'm not as much of a procrastinator as I thought. I just hope that I never have to pull an all-nighter because I don’t think I could do it.
And so ends my first year of college.
posted by Sharon @ 8:25 PM
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