A seven page paper analyzing dialogue between Reading Lolita in Tehran and Pride and Prejudice is due tonight. Hmmm…this will be fun. Can't I just put a toothpick in my eye? No? Alright then...to begin my long and painful endeavor I must first find the book that will be my main text. What did I do with that book! Ok. The only logical thing I can do is pray. Dear God….Oh please let me find my book…quickly. Please let it be somewhere on my desk. (This will be a task only the brave will be able to endure…so many things on my desk). These kinds of assignments are so very time consuming. Really, that is the only thing that I find to be my problem. Just like most of us, I want to get an assignment, whether it be work or school, sit down for an hour or so and Viola! A completed project! Not very likely in this case.
So there I sit, looking at the instructions. This seems so deep! So many places to find information. Crap! I am really going to have to read this stuff! So I figured maybe if I start out with an outline and then just fill in information under each heading it will make life easier, maybe. See I have this problem grasping concepts. I can read the same instructions as everyone else and get something completely different! The sad thing about that is that I am 37 years old and I figured that out just last month. Bad. It explains so much!
Back to the paper. Since there is such a small section in Reading Lolita in Tehran devoted to Pride and Prejudice I think that I will start there. This will give me an idea of what my focus will be on. If there were not such a creation as Double Stuff Oreo’s I really do not know how would ever defeat this monstrous paper. I have already consumed half of a package and I have 4 points for my 7 page paper. I’m going to need to go to Wal-Mart. Yes…I need to do that now. I will come back to my paper later.
As I resume this hideous task ahead of me (cookies at hand) I decided to go back over the instructions, due to my very great ability to miss important information, and mentally get things in shuffle. Ooh. I missed the part about 5 sources. Five sources! On what?! What will I use these sources for? Where are those cookies?! I must convince myself that this is really no big deal. Really…I mean its only two books, five sources, and 7 pages; ok…I needed a really good quote! Ah Ha! How do you eat an elephant? One bit at a time.
One bite at a time, the first thing I need to do is to complete my outline. At least I will be much more familiar with the issues that I have to analyze. Once I have them in different categories, with examples from each book and a source to back up the meaning, the similarity type or difference, then I can begin the excruciating process of turning this jumbled mess into a paper. Yikes…panic….no, your fine….really….Oh gosh…I’m going to fail!
This portion of your blog really stuck out to me: “So I figured maybe if I start out with an outline and then just fill in information under each heading it will make life easier, maybe. See I have this problem grasping concepts. I can read the same instructions as everyone else and get something completely different!”
ReplyDeleteI’ve been having the same problem with my essays. I think that I understand what the directions are asking for, and then find out I haven’t done what was expected. This is difficult because I become attached to what I have written and then have to change it. This class is nothing like any other English class I have taken before.
Thank you for reminding me of the old joke of how to eat an elephant. I really needed to hear those encouraging words. It felt like so much work when I started but the father I get in the assignment the easier it becomes. I also liked your idea about getting cookies for while you work. Personally, I like peanut butter cookies – and especially the ones at Camilles Sidewalk Café. I might just have to work there and enjoy a delicious peanut butter cookie while I hammer this thing out.
Best of luck to you as you work on your paper.
Reading your blog sounds like you were quite stressed and maybe "quite" is an understatement, but I understand being the fact that I am also a college student. I like how you said that you were think of coming up with an outline and then filling it in. That is actually a really goof idea, one of my friends had to type a 10 page paper for her Philosophy of Religion class and she had three hours to finish, luckily the night before she had done an outline of what she was going to include in her paper and within an hour she had gotten up to page 4 of her paper. So if you actually did do the outline for your paper I'm sure it gave you an easier time to fill it in.
ReplyDeleteDon’t you just hate when you are finally ready to sit down and start your paper, and you suddenly can’t find the book you are using haha. That’s just the way it goes sometimes, almost as if the universe doesn’t want us to finish as punishment of procrastination. I agree, time consumption is what is so off-putting about research papers. I am one of those people where I like to just sit down and get the assignment over with, like you said. That just doesn’t seem to work with research papers; they seem to take hours, days, sometimes weeks. I do like that aspect of research papers, only because you can think of something or come across new information, but when you do a normal assignment where you just sit down and get it over with you can’t do this. That’s the beauty of research projects they provoke thought, and you actually do learn from them. I like the fact that you are making blueprints on how you are going to attack the assignment, so that way you know what you are going to do and how you are going to do it. This helps make the assignment much less overwhelming. Good luck on your paper I’m sure you’ll do fine.
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