What is a college paper?

We often do not give page lengths, thereby creating great anxiety, to which I respond by reminding fretting students of the fellow who asked Abraham Lincoln how long a man's legs should be. "Long enough to reach the ground," was his wise response. Your paper too needs to be long enough to carry the body of the text, no more, no less. This refusal to be specific causes problems for me as well, but by giving eight-page assignments to students with four pages worth of knowledge, we professors work against our own instructions. We say, "be brief,""be concise," "don't waste words," and we make fun of bureaucrats who write thirty-page memos on how to buy a doughnut. Then we give out assignments that force many students to learn how to turn four pages of information into eight pages of words. By doing this, we are in fact inadvertently teaching the very excess of verbiage we claim to abhor. Instead, I say, define your topic, establish your argument, present the evidence for this argument, rebut objections, and bring it all to a resounding conclusion. To do all this should take at least four or eight or twenty or whatever the number of pages that may have been assigned. If you think you can do it in fewer than the minimum required, may Allah be merciful. If you require a bit more, I'll try to understand. Do the best job you can.

Timing Counts!

In graduate school one semester, taking a seminar on William Faulkner from the great Hyatt Waggoner, I had the opportunity to shock a young classmate. She and I and a fellow student were walking along the brick sidewalk outside of class talking about the term papers we had been assigned. Suddenly, she turned and stopped us both in our tracks demanding, "Wait a minute! Are you guys actually saying that you intend to get these papers in on the assigned date?" He and I gave each other puzzled looks and shrugged. She stomped off in a fury saying, "I never heard of such a thing. Why, I've never handed in a paper on time in my life. What are you guys trying to pull?" She didn't return the following semester. He and I are now up to our keisters in sophomore papers.

Deadlines are meant to be taken seriously, not absolutely, but seriously. You are going to have to sit down at some point and do the work, so you might as well determine to do it at the first opportunity instead of the last. There'll be plenty of time for procrastination in the grave. I wish I had the gall of Harvard's late great Alan Heimert. He once assigned us a term paper to be handed in on April 18. After giving us that date, he drummed his fingers on the table, looked up at the chandeliers, then sighed, "Okay, if you develop pneumonia and your dog goes into labor, I suppose I have to let you have an extra week. There, you've got until the twenty-fifth." Then he gritted his teeth, drummed some more, and said, "All right, all right, if the government is overthrown and you have to march on Washington to save the republic, I guess I'll have to give you one more week. There! Do not ask for any more extensions. I've given you an absolute deadline and two extensions. If you can't get it in by May first, forget it!"

Still, some students will insist on making excuses and requesting extensions. One of the problems with this is that we teachers have heard them all. I always tell my sophomores at the beginning of my survey course to kiss their grandparents good-bye before the final, since so many of them seem to kick off that week. Even if there is a death in the family, you need to grit your teeth and get on with life. How long can a funeral take, anyhow?