Concentration, concentration....ohh look...A CHICKEN!

By DeanaKubat on April 15, 2008 10:20 PM | | Comments (0)

Avoid Distractions

Stay On Topic

If you are like most students writing a short paper, you will stare at the computer screen for a while until you come up with a title. Then you will pick your way through your topic, offering an extremely broad introduction (see Glittering Generalities, below). You might also type in a few long quotations that you like. After writing fluff for a page or two, you will eventually hit on a fairly good idea.  You will pursue it for a paragraph or two, perhaps throwing in another quotation.
 
By then, you'll realize that you've got almost three pages written, so you will tack on a hasty conclusion.  Hooray, you've finished your paper!  Well, not quite.  At the very least, you ought to rewrite your title and introduction to match your conclusion, so it looks like the place you ended up was where you were intending to go all along.  You probably won't get an A, because you're still submitting two pages of fluff; but you will get credit for recognizing whatever you actually did accomplish.
 
To get an A, you should delete all that fluff, use the "good idea" that you stumbled across as your new starting point, and keep going.  If you want the "A", you have to work for it.  Even "good writers" have to work hard (in my class, anyway).

See: Sally Slacker Writes a Paper, and Sally's Professor Responds

 

 

I'm a bad stickler for this one.  i always some how get side tracked on making another point apart from the one i started out talking about.  its not that a train of thought is lost, it just pops up and like a spastic child with ADD you can't help but just switch and your off of a different track.

 

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