What is a college paper?
We writers get to be a pretty hard-hearted, cynical bunch.
Once a sexy young female from Iran came up to me before the midterm, stood altogether too close,
and oozed that she would do "anyzing" for an A. When I suggested that she work harder,
she burst into tears and confessed she had a problem. She was in the United States, she said, on
a grant that required her to get straight A's. If she lost the grant, she would have to drop out
of school. If she had to drop out of school, she would lose her student visa and have to return
to Iran. Since her father had supported the Shah, if she returned to Iran, she would surely be
shot. "Well, guess you really had better work harder," I said. She left in a snit. A
week later she was back with another story. This time, she said, she would tell me the truth.
She had been exaggerating before, but the truth was that her husband was paying her tuition.
He did not believe women should go to college, but if she wanted to go on his money, she had
to make straight A's or he would beat her. I believed her that time for some reason, but my
answer was the same: Work harder.
How Much Work Do I Have to Do?
Do not even contemplate trying to write the paper in one
draft unless it is already 3:00 a.m. of the morning the paper is due and you are so far gone that
you don't care what grade you get as long as the assignment is accepted. The first draft is always
just a rough sketch of possibilities.
The very act of writing can itself be liberating. The
rough first draft may well be nothing more than a page or two of hastily scribbled impressions.
If you have any interest or curiosity at all, whether negative or positive, about a specific
character or phrase or event, begin describing it. You will be amazed how soon ideas begin to flow.
But under no circumstances should you think of this first effort as any more than the jotting down
of rough preliminary notes.
If the first draft, then, is barely comprehensible,
the second draft is your best working paper. This is written once you have a pretty good idea
of what you want to do. It is the skeleton of what will become your final paper. It is also
the hardest one to write. Do not worry here about perfection, for this is also the draft that
you next must comb over carefully to correct logic and organization, to note where better evidence
is called for or has been left out, or where the argument has wandered off the path. The third
draft then comes close to being your finished paper, but this is the copy that needs to be
examined closely for typos, grammatical mistakes, misspellings, and other last-minute problems.
Ideally, then, your fourth draft should be your final paper.
Okay, laugh, but at least you've been told.
