BITE-SIZE ESSAYS

By: Simone Feigenbaum

Like many students, I'm a procrastinator. The thought of having to write a paper often ends up seeming like a Herculean task, so I avoid it until the last minute, and need to do everything at once, which just reinforces my avoidance of it. 

What I have found, though, is that breaking the paper up into smaller, easier to digest tasks can greatly ease the process. 

This is how I break down projects for a research paper:

Step one: Research

This is my favorite part. Find an aspect of the topic that interests you, and look into it. The library research desk can be a great help with this part. Make sure you keep track of the things you've read and what you've learned from them. It will make the following steps far easier.

Step two: Find a question

Now that you've done some research into your topic, what questions do you have? What did you find most interesting? That's your topic.

Step three: Outlining

When you were in high school, your teachers probably taught you how to make a basic outline, and you probably ignored them. I did too. But they do help. They don't need to follow any specific format; play around and find what works best for you. I usually decide what I want to talk about in each paragraph, and write down my support for each point, along with where I found the information to make citations easier. My outlines are handwritten: informal, messy, and covered in arrows from moving points around. Yours may be typewritten with neat bullet points. It's up to you.

Step three: Write the essay!

Look at your outline: it's basically your complete essay. Follow your own instructions, and add an introduction and a conclusion. 

That's it! You're done! Proofread, write your bibliography, turn it in, and get yourself a treat! You've earned it! 

Re-Outline to Stay Focused

By Mina Anderson

Normally, it’s best policy to give yourself several days ahead of an essay deadline to compose and edit your writing. This is because spacing out some of the difficult writing steps and giving yourself time to rest allows you to come back to the essay refreshed and re-focused. However, busy schedules (and often procrastination) sometimes lead to long last-minute writing hours at the computer. Procrastination often happens in the first place when we get “stuck” in our writing, which is when we are prone to taking lots of breaks and “walking away” from the assignment. This prolongs the whole writing process. To ensure staying on task, re-outlining your paper can also serve as a short sort of mental break without distracting you from the assignment itself.

Before you begin to write, outline the general structure of your essay. Write down a sentence for your thesis statement and a topic sentence for each of your major paragraphs/arguments. You can then do a skeletal, bullet-point outline of the rest of your paper. Sometime at this point in your writing process, you may also choose to type up the evidence or quotes from other texts in your outline so as to later have them handy. Then you won’t have to use up some of your writing time leafing through articles or papers, giving you more time to focus on the real issue at hand: composing your own argument.

Then, over the course of writing, every time you get stuck and are likely to take a break from writing, re-create your outline. You may find that the structure of your argument in the essay has changed – for instance, maybe you phrased your thesis statement differently in the first draft, or found that in the course of writing you had more to say about a peripheral piece of evidence than you originally anticipated. In cases where the structure of the essay is shaping up to be different from the original outline, alter your outline. Then, when you have finished re-outlining the structure of the essay, you will be able to observe that structure’s “skeletal” body and evaluate its trajectory: is the structure and organization of your essay turning out the way you had originally envisioned? If not, is the new structure more helpful to your argument, or would reverting to the original outline enable you to better explore the essay topic? Which argument points could be collapsed or expanded in order to give you more “wiggle room” to explore your topic more thoroughly or in new directions?

Re-outlining at moments in your writing when you become stuck can allow you to take a mental break of sorts without completely walking away from the essay. It helps keep you focused on the task at hand while also giving you some distance from your writing, so that you might be able to evaluate the essay as a whole and make holistic decisions about where it will be headed next.