The Prewriting Process
Before you embark on the journey of writing an extensive research paper, it’s important to put just as much effort into the prewriting process. Follow these simple steps and the words will flow directly from your fingertips onto the screen. At least, I hope they will.
- Stress out about writing the research paper. It’ll be so hard.
- Eat a turkey sandwich. Wash it down with a Mountain Dew. You can do this. You just need to get started, and once you get the first page under your belt, you’ll feel so much better.
- Take a shower. You’ll think better when you’re clean.
- Scrub your toilet. You’ll be able to think even better if your toilet sparkles.
- Clean your bedroom. It’s hard to be organized if your environment looks like a crack den.
- Shred several months of accumulated junk mail. You don’t want any criminals getting their hands on an offer to set up a frequent flier account. You don’t want them to subscribe you to any magazines, either.
- Empty the shredder.
- Print out a list of all of your library books and make sure you still have them all. In case, you know, one of them wandered off.
- Go through all of your library books and make the following piles: Probably Not that Useful, Maybe Kinda Useful, Probably Useful.
- Dinner! Take another hit of Mountain Dew.
- Be very virtuous and turn down an invitation to a movie. You’re working, after all.
- Clear off your desk. Who can think with all of these stacks of paper everywhere?
- Make sure you’ve printed all of the notes you typed up. Shuffle the sheaves of paper around until they’re in chronological order and tidy-looking.
- Liberally label sections of your notes with Post-It notes.
- Devise an impractically complicated color-coding system with a set of colored pencils.
- Categorize your sheaves of notes by marking the margins with the appropriate category color.
- Straighten the piles.
- It’s getting kind of late. It’s probably better if you go to bed now so you’re well-rested enough to dive into the writing first thing, bright and early tomorrow morning.
- Talk to Alan on the phone for an hour. Discuss important topics like the appropriate ripeness of bananas and people who spell their names wrong. Whine about how hard it is to write a research paper.
- Go to sleep.
- Wake up not-so-bright-and-early.
- Eat rice pudding for breakfast.
- Magically waste two hours. Take a shower, look up which classes are offered in the fall, and ponder writing a letter to the manufacturer of your electric blanket.
- Install Word on your computer so you can write your damn paper.
- Go out on errands.
- Drive by your old house and try to see if the new owners have filled the lawn with garish Easter decorations. Nope, just bunny decals in the windows. You guess you can handle that.
- Go to a mega-mart you always swore you’d avoid because of the way they treat their employees and their tendency to shut down small businesses.
- Be pleasantly surprised at how cheap everything is. Get sick of it and leave. Make sure to pick up some snack foods, though- you’ll need brain food if you’re going to be holed up writing all weeekend.
- Go to a clothing store that stocks merchandise you’ve never liked that much. You have a $10 coupon.
- Almost decide not to buy anything, but then find the sunglasses. You don’t really like buying sunglasses, but with this coupon, they’d be almost free. Try on six pairs. Hem and haw. Finally decide on some that make you look like you have giant insect eyes. Why not? They’re almost free.
- Find some shoes that would be good for work. What will you do? You’ve already talked yourself into a pair of sunglasses. Oh, what the hell, buy them both.
- Go to Panera. Order a metric ton of pastries and bagels. Buy some lunch, too. Get a Mountain Dew- you’ll need the caffeine for the work ahead of you.
- Stop by the snooty gourmet grocery and buy a frozen goose, some twice-baked potatoes, and a brownie.
- Eat your brownie on the way home.
- Put away your groceries stylishly in your new shades. Leave the specs on for half an hour and decide they pinch your head.
- Stare at your computer. This is it. Here goes everything. Time to write!
- Document your prewriting process on your blog, in case it helps fellow students.
- 25 hours after your initial declaration to write your paper, hit “Publish” on your blog and reluctantly open Word.
To be continued…
