Of Wine and Editing.

I mentioned last post about my near nervous breakdown, yes? Well, my mother has taken it upon herself to force me to see a doctor of sorts. She called me the other day (seven times!) while I was at work, sick to death that I had run away or hurt myself (even though I always work Tuesdays) and threatened to take time off, come down to the city, and drag me into a doctor's office. Which will not happened, because I will muster all my moxie and go by myself like the total adult that I am. This decision did not prevent me from drinking an entire bottle of wine before the husband got home and being drunk all night instead of writing my paper. Which I wrote last night and this morning (1200 words!) and will now be blogging about.

Okay, so essay writing 101 (because this, being only 1200 words, was a pretty 101 paper, a nice first real essay for a degree, if I do say so myself):
The biggest thing that I can say about writing essays is: edit. That is all. Period. The end.
A lot of undergraduate essay writing (from my experience as an undergraduate who did this, a lot) goes like this:
read book
*internet*
make some notes
*internet*
decide on a topic
*internet*
write until I want to die OMGIAMSOTIREDICANTSTAYAWAKE, must finish GRADESGRADESGRADES
*internet*
print.
hand in.

(where *internet* refers to fooling around on the internet, rather than shopping for topics and being a plagiarist)

I have always worked (as an undergrad and a grad student) as a student marker. You know what? People who read your papers can tell that you did this. Yup. They can tell because the last page is way less coherent than the rest of it, and you leave out silly words. Sometimes you leave notes for yourself in the middle of the paper like *remember to come back here* or *OMG delete this it is terrible!! ;( *. I panicked the first time I marked an essay that had been composed this way, struck almost unconscious with terror at the realization that other people reading my work could tell, too. And then I started editing.

Very basic things you can do to help yourself out:
!.) start your paper at least two days before it is due. Even if you mostly make notes, collect quotes, whatever. You should probably start sooner, but this is a pretty decent amount of time for most undergraduate essays.
2.) finish a "mostly final draft" the night before. Sleep.
3.) Wake up, edit. (you CAN edit sooner if you want, this is okay too!) It is important to take some time between finishing a draft and editing, or else you'll just see what you THINK you wrote on the page, rather than what is actually there, those pesky things like missed punctuation or extra words. The stuff that screams DID NOT EDIT at whoever is reading your work. If you can't give it an entire night give it at least an hour. At least.

Okay folks, off to class to hand in my paper. More later!