Writing papers, regardless of length, takes a lot of effort. You have to be mentally prepared and physically able to spend hours to make your writing good. Without further ado, here are the 10 stages of paper writing.
Stage 1: Procrastination.
Let’s face it, you never want to write a paper. In fact, I’m writing this article while procrastinating writing my latest philosophy paper. You never write it the day it’s assigned, because you’ll have two weeks to deal with that. At this point, it seems like your best bet to let future you deal with it.
Stage 2: Outline.
When you near deadline day, you’ll decide that you need to at least make an outline to give future you some help. You come up with a few bullet points about the subject, throw together a tacky thesis and close with a cliché. Then, of course, you open up Chrome or Safari and you’re right back in front of "House of Cards" or "Parks and Rec" for the next season.
Stage 3: Preparing for failure.
Here’s when you re-read the assignment and realize that it’ll take much longer than you initially thought it would. This puts you into panic mode, because there are only so many hours between this point and the deadline. You start to rush the paper and your ideas aren’t that good.
Stage 4: Trying to supplement.
You know you’ll go online to find some definition or quote to take up a paragraph or so, just to make your paper seem longer to the professor. It’ll be less work for you to do in the short-term, and maybe you’ll be able to find something of substance to elaborate on in your own words.
Stage 5: Enthusiasm.
You add in your supplementation and suddenly your paper has some bulk to it. You get a few good ideas that excite you about the work, so you add them in (each in their own paragraph, of course) with as much explanation as possible without being overly redundant. This, unfortunately, is the peak of the paper writing happiness graph.
Stage 6: Writer’s block.
Everyone gets here, and it usually happens almost immediately following Stage 5. As soon as you finish the last sentence of your latest great idea, you stop and your mind goes blank. You can’t think about what to write that could top that, or you can’t think what else fits in that subject area. You begin looking at your other paragraphs to see what needs work, but you keep drawing blanks.
Stage 7: The decision.
The night before it’s due, you’ll find yourself asking whether or not you should stay up for two or three more (or, god help you, more) hours to finish the paper and then sleep in, or go to bed now and get up at 5 a.m. to finish it. Ultimately, you’ll take about half an hour to decide while checking all of your social media profiles at 12:30 a.m. and once again leaving future you to deal with this mess.
Stage 8: The morning it is due.
You decided to turn in before finishing last night and you wake up with the paper being the absolute last thing you want to do. However, you know you’ve got to get it done before class, and you’ve finally gotten past the dreaded writer’s -- wait a minute, class starts in 20 minutes across campus and you’re not dressed!
Stage 9: The extension (you hope...).
You’ll show up to class half-dressed with your hair messed up, and your laptop clinging to life in your arms. You desperately summon whatever energy you have to ask for an extension, and if your professor is nice enough, he or she will give you until the end of the day to get it in (or longer, if you’re really lucky).
Stage 10: Relief!
After how the last 24 hours have treated you, you decide you need a break. Refer to Stage 1 to see how this continues.
