The Problem with Essays

I am writing a paper which is due today. I started it last night. And this is what I was thinking:

I am supposed to be working on my 3 page Great Gatsby paper for American Lit—which is due tomorrow (Wednesday). It is 21h00 and I would rather be reading. Doing Linguistics homework for Thursday, reading, watching Bones, taking a shower, knitting, looking up various things—blog hopping, etc. That’s all. Not this paper. I have stated what I believe the focus of my chosen passage happens to be. It’s all about perception. Now that I’ve said that, I have nothing left to say. I’ve already written some very crude ideas…stream of consciousness almost. All the ideas have to do with my topic are crude and rough and raw, and I do not have the patience to polish up the wording/structure. I just want to put all the ideas and content down on the page and have done with it.

That’s the problem with essays; they’re painstaking. You can’t just write down what you think. You then have to organize, revise, reorganize, and nit-pick everything. It takes time. And when you are doing an assignment the night before (not because you intentionally left it to the last minute, but because you had other homework due sooner and wanted to make sure that that was finished first), you don’t have the luxury of taking your time and nitpicking. You only have the chance to generate ideas and put them on paper and then read through what you’ve written and fixed major errors.