Don’t let writing papers stop you from writing

Home Culture Don’t let writing papers stop you from writing

Slow down. Enjoy reading the newspaper. Sure, it’s hell week and you’ve got a helluva lot of pages to finish before you can sleep—or ingest whatever cocktail of stimulants and supplements and fumes you’ve replaced that with before studying for finals—but you need to stop and remember life is bigger than this. Go check out this week’s cartoon. Breathe.

In all the research and late nights, eyes bleary and bloodshot, wrists making first forays into the Carpal Tunnel, you have likely ceased to think of this as writing. This is survival and you are sacrificing your body on an altar equal parts self-inflicted dearth of time and professor promised death of grade. The grey number in the corner of the Microsoft Word display is the enemy. It refuses to grow and laughs at your tears. You never smoked before this week, but now you hope cigarettes and writers go together in more ways than lung cancer. You’re sceptical that Hemingway was thinking about a term paper when he gave his famous alcoholic authorial advice, but you’re willing to try it. Besides, you won’t even have time to edit, so you don’t even have to sober up before the weekend.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Hell week might. I’m not here to say you should have started sooner, done your homework, read more, taken better notes. You can tell yourself that. Term papers may very well have to be this not-divine and not-particularly-funny Dantean descent that ends with you curled in the corner of the library basement, hoping the books aren’t actually talking and that’s just the caffeine and the sleep deprivation and everything will be OK soon. But writing doesn’t.

In all the pain of this week, and the next, and the first half of the one after that, don’t forget that writing can be fun. I’m not just talking about trolling on facebook, or texting the girl you haven’t quite got around to growing the gonads to ask out to lunch, or those Shakespearean fridge magnets. It’s not just a journal, or a personal poem, or a love note, or that sonnet you want to get published, or that story that might just grow up to be novel. There’s more than the vignette that is fine just being little, thank you very much, or a spray painted four letter concrete cave painting, or a few pages for your favorite seminar. It is all of this, and it is also the term paper.

It can even be the term paper you didn’t put the preparatory work in for. That makes it harder to be comfortable, harder to care about quality when you’re focused on the clock face, but it can, and must, be done.

Have fun writing your essays. Care about how you say what you say. Don’t just write because you have to. Make the decision to take your assignment as an opportunity, not a burden. You’re supposed to write about how economic conditions in late 19th century France contributed to the rise of communist political movements in southeast Asia? First, that’s actually probably a super interesting topic and maybe I need to go Wikipedia binge now. Second, just because you’re bored doesn’t mean your professor has to be, so make those sentences varied and interesting and that argument tighter than a pair of your high school jeans. Third, entertain yourself.

Engross yourself in not just the topic, but the words and phrases and rhythms and structure of your paper. Even if your argument wouldn’t convince a three year-old, don’t let your sentences go to waste. Ignore the fact that your professor has to read your paper for their job, and make your prose compelling enough to keep them interested in, if not what you say, how you say it. Bonus points if you write not just with verve, but with wit—whimsy too.

Micah Meadowcroft is a junior from Vancouver, Washington majoring in history and minoring in journalism through the Dow Journalism Program. This is his last issue as the Arts editor for the Collegian.