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November 23, 2004
Paper-writing Hell
I'm 4.3 pages into my first 8-10 page paper for Jazz History and it's like pulling teeth. Which sucks. I expected it to be so much easier. I mean, the research went fabulously. I've got all kinds of stuff from all sorts of sources. And it organized itself perfectly. I put together an outline in about 15 minutes (the speed partly due, I think, to the fabulous new pen with which I was writing).
And that's where the ease and fabulousness stopped.
I went to my office at the University to write, because our cleaning lady came yesterday. (For those of you who are horrified to read that last sentence, know that I, good socialist that I am, would never have caved but: 1) the house was completely disgusting thanks to the complete lack of time for anything created by graduate school, 2)I had horrific asthma and 2-3 bouts with pneumonia last winter caused by the aforementioned dirty house and lack of time and 3) she's a very nice woman in her 20's with a cute little girl and her own housekeeping business, so I'm not paying some huge firm that abuses its employees and you never get a clean house anyway.)
But back to my story.
I went to the office to write the paper. And it took 2 hours to write the 4+ pages. Yes, I had to go through all my notes to organize the supporting material to work with the outline. But then it was like thinking through molasses.
Sssssssllllllloooooooooooooowwwwwwwww wwwwwwwoooooooooooooooorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrk.
Paradoxically, at the same time as I was having huge amounts of trouble getting the words out, I seemed to be flying through my outline. So that in the slightly more than 4 pages I am already more than 2/3 of the way through my information and arguments. And I thought I was going to have trouble getting it down to 10 pages. So I now need to go back through and see where I can pad things. (Plus, I need to have more of my own thoughts between the great big sections of quoted material.) So the paper I thought I would have done last night is not done. And I still have to research and write the other.
Fortunately, my fabulous friend Paul just told me about an interview with August Wilson. My second paper is on blues singer Ma Rainey, and I really wanted to be able to talk about Wilson in it because he wrote the play "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom." And now I'll have a really new and up-to-date source. WooHoo!
Posted by sally at November 23, 2004 09:04 AM
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