How To
The Non-Expert: Term Paper
Experts answer what they know. The Non-Expert answers anything. This week ANDREW WOMACK heeds the call from a forlorn student and explains how any term paper can be stretched to meet its page quota. To meet its page quota. To meet its page quota.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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- Superpowers, Revealed (Of Recent Note)
Also by Andrew Womack
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- The Non-Expert: 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover (May 27, 2005)
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Question: Help me. I’ve got two hours to finish a term paper and I’ve got zero ideas. My professor said it had to be five pages and I’m stuck. I hope you get this in time, even if you can’t answer right away I had to vent. Ugh. —Amy S.
Answer: Well, your paper’s probably already turned in and graded—and though we did get your question in time, we had zero ideas about how to answer it. So at least there’s next semester. Or at least we hope there’s a next semester.
But if school taught us how to do anything, it showed us how to turn the un-presentable into the presentable—at least by the end of class on the due date. In fact, we can assure you there is no poster that can’t be improved with an extra photocopied textbook illustration, no diorama that can’t rise another letter grade with an accompanying oral argument about how you’ve truly revealed Ibsen’s underlying dramatic—and certainly no short essay that resists inflation into a term paper four times the normal size of its content.
Though you’ve possibly exploited some of these techniques before, to attempt them all in one paper would not only be remarkable, but it would also be fascinating, perhaps even extraordinary, and even—just maybe, just possibly—astounding and impressive.
* * *
Of course, it’s not all about you. Sometimes you have to keep your readers in mind. And, in this case, it’s your instructor, and providing some extra margin space is the kind of consideration that leaves room for any stellar commentary (“Finally! A student who considers a teacher’s penmanship!!”)
Also, turn that point size up a click.
The next step is to think about how word choice, or, more to the point, word length, can please a paper-grader’s eye. After all, there is no arguable reason you should write “many” when “numerous” scores you an extra half-inch on the page. Similarly, sentence construction must by no means actually get to, or rather approach (in simpler, more easily understood, perhaps more pedestrian terms) the item in question about which you are working toward, and alongside which the reader is following you. In fact, it will also assist and facilitate the reader’s comprehension of your—the writer’s—most underlying and important points, if you show what it is you are trying to intuit through pure description rather than rely exclusively upon wording.
Should your point, however, not have been sufficiently conducted or rather effused through the use of the first image, then more illustration may present itself as necessary and/or required and/or desired and/or desirable. After all, it should be noted—as I believe all of us here can and will agree—that conciseness gets nobody anywhere, or rather somebody nowhere—that it only obscures our deepest, most important, most intimate communication, and so it is true that further explanation may be helpful in its inclusion in your documentation.
Though we would be remiss if we did not take to heart, in the words of the great Ernest Hemingway:
Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.Although, in a similar, though also dissimilar view, no less an esteemable character as Ezra Pound put it best (and differently) with:
I am writing to resist the view that Europe and civilization are going to Hell. If I am being “crucified for an idea”—that is, the coherent idea around which my muddles accumulated—it is probably the idea that European culture ought to survive, that the best qualities of it ought to survive along with whatever cultures, in whatever universality. Against the propaganda of terror and the propaganda of luxury, have you a nice simple answer?But should we then ignore the words of Robert Frost, who was quoted thusly upon the topic of word-writing?
Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.As you near your yardage of verbiage, should you still find yourself perhaps just under your mark of necessitated pagination, then a final flourish should force/push/send/propel you straight through, over, into—in fact—beyond the finish line… (Should you be willing to go that far, and we believe that you are, given your tenacity and predilection for these things.), and so:
Big ideas take big words, and as long as you’re full of both, you can’t help but do… something.
