It’s happened to almost everyone. You have some paper for a class that slips under the radar somehow; maybe it was on the syllabus but you never got around to writing down the due dates on your calendar; maybe you lost your calendar; maybe you’ve been so crazy busy that you only just now had time to look at your calendar. How you got here doesn’t matter; what matters is that your paper is due tomorrow.
Or today.
Or in three hours.
Exactly how much time you have in this disaster scenario is also unimportant; what’s important is that you don’t have enough. What you need (aside from the deus ex machina of your professor deciding to push back the deadline) is a plan.
Disaster Plan Phase 1: Enter Disaster Mode
What is disaster mode? It’s when you know there’s a disaster ensuing and that your time is precious. You have to focus on this paper and not even think about anything else. Turn off your phone and hide it in the bathroom cabinet. Close your other tabs. Turn off the TV. There’s only one thing that matters for the next three hours: your history paper.
Disaster Plan Phase 2: Study the Prompt
Of course, you’ve probably read the prompt already. This time, though, study it closely to figure out exactly what you need to earn points. This is a great time to get out the rubric and figure out how the paper is going to be graded. If you get 20 points just for using a secondary source, that might be something worth investing your valuable time on. If you automatically get a 0 on the paper if you don’t address a certain subject, make sure that even if you address nothing else, you address that subject. If you only lose 10% of your final grade for turning in the paper the next day, it might be worth it to take the time to write a decent paper and get 90% of the 80% you’ll get for taking your time instead of getting 100% of the 20% you’ll likely get by writing it in one night.
Disaster Plan Phase 3: Prioritize
This step is crucial, and it’s predicated on the phase 2. Having read through the rubric and prompt and figured out which parts of the paper are most important, create a clear list of priorities. Make sure that your list of priorities is realistic for what you have time to do (also, make sure you include time at the end to cite all your sources, as not citing your sources is plagiarism and will almost guarantee you a 0). Maybe this means that you’re going to have a thesis, one piece of evidence, and a conclusion. Maybe this means that you’re going to have an outline with a few arguments filled in. Maybe it means that you’re going to have a source that connects to the prompt and a brief discussion of the source. Whatever your list of priorities is, just make sure your time will be spent as efficiently as possible. Which, considering how valuable your time is, means that these steps are not only helpful when you have a paper due in three hours, but also three weeks.
Disaster Plan Phase 4: Lesson Learned
Finally, put the rest of those due dates on the calendar, so you don’t have to go through all that again!
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Owen Duncan is a senior from Fargo, North Dakota (which is exactly like the movie). He is a pre-seminary student at Concordia University Irvine with a double major in English and music. He has experience working with both MLA and CMS formatting styles, and he has a great love for reading fiction and stories of all types (and editing them). He also has a soft spot for experimental stuff (think Alejandro Zambra), so if you’re ever working on a story for a class without any punctuation and you like it that way, he’s your guy. If you don’t like it that way, he’s also more than happy to help you with that too. When he’s not working on classwork, you can probably find him practicing trombone for the Wind Orchestra, Sinfonietta, or Jazz Band.