Writing papers

We're right in the middle of the two weeks we get to write our first paper. And it's really funny to talk to various people about papers and see the completely different ways people approach it.

First, my dad. I asked him about paper length when a maximum rather than a minimum is given, and embedded in his response was this insight into organization: "The best strategy I've found is to choose a topic that interests you, subdivide it, figure a paragraph for each subdivision, add two paragraphs for intro and conclusion, count up the paragraphs (usu. about 3-4 a page) and see how many pages that comes out to. If it's too many, or if the subdivisions are logicially further divisible, maybe do the paper on a subtopic instead." Wow dad. That's really regimented.

Lost Rocket's process seems to be similar. I ran into her yesterday and I told her I had a draft, but one in need of some serious first-pass editing before I would give it to anyone else to look at. "Ugh," she responded, "I don't even have an outline." I never use outlines. Whenever I try to outline a paper first, I inevitably find that at least one of my bullet points I actually have hardly anything to say about, and then the whole structure falls apart.

Senor Evergreen, whom I hung out with one last time before he went up to Olympia, has a radically different strategy. "When I have to write a paper," he says dramatically, "I just sit down and... write a paper." I chuckled in recognition. That's what I used to do in high school, but the papers I produce when I do that aren't long enough for college assignments.

Apparently it works for some, however, because my floor had breakfast together this morning and several of my dormies were discussing the paper too - specifically, when they were going to work on it. "I'm not going to do it on Friday," one of them said. "Well maybe," he continued. "I only have two classes in the morning, so I could do it before everyone gets out of class." Should I infer that this person means to write it all in one session? He must find paper-writing really easy.

My friend the philosopher-linguist suggested something that resonates with me a little more. "Writing is like having a conversation with the page," he said. "You almost want to anticipate - not objections exactly - but responses from a reader."

The approach I've used for this paper went like this: I discarded the eerily prevalent (and in my opinion, completely fallacious) claim that you need a strong introduction to know where you're going. I opened up a blank document and just started writing whatever occurred to me about the topic. When a new point occurred to me, I made a line break and started a new paragraph. I developed several trains of thought at once, bouncing between the paragraphs on my screen, and my use of language became less conversational and more literary as I worked. When I got pooped, I left it alone and came back later until the flow of ideas was just about wrapping up. Then I looked over what I had written and assessed how everything connected. I pulled a thesis out of it and wrote an introduction. Then I started putting paragraphs in a logical order, trimming redundant information that had turned up in more than one place, and creating transitions. Some paragraphs didn't get used at all. Finally I got to the end, reviewed my work, and constructed my conclusion so as to pull everything back together. Now there is a draft and I'm just refining the flow.