Tonight I have my first essay for Scottish Lit. due. The guidelines, among other things, state that it should be about eight pages, but longer is okay.
I remember a time when the idea of writing an eight page paper was a page count that'd put me in a panic. "What can I possibly write about for eight whole pages?!"
These days there's less panic and more, "Okay, it'll take me about this long to read these articles so I can talk about them. About this long to do my Works Cited, and roughly this long to actually write the paper." A little bit of mental math later, and I have pretty good idea of not only how it's possible to write eight pages about anything, but also how long it'll take.
It's funny to think about it. Funnier yet, to think about it in relation to my Comp. 101 class. If I walked in to class tomorrow and announced that they had an eight page paper due next week, I wonder if half the students wouldn't immediately pull out paper bags and start hyperventilating.
How long does it take to write an eight page paper? About a day and a half.
On a related note, I found a nifty book on Scottish folklore in ballads. It's a bit reference heavy, sometimes mentioning half a dozen different ballads in half a page, but there's good stuff in it. Folklore in The English & Scottish Ballads by Lowry Charles Wimberly.
3 comments:
One time I had a whole semester to do a ten-page research paper. I only used about a week of that time, and it was the last week, but really that was all I needed...
I think it was Deb who once told me that the level of work manages to adjust to the time allotted. Or something along those lines.
Or the amount of clutter you have adjusts to the amount of desk space you have.
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