[BuriedThrice]

I've just recently started college and I'm getting used to managing my time and completing my assignments on time. I took 3.5 years off before I decided to continue on to college and now I'm almost 2 months in and I'm getting by in my academics. I'm living in a Wellness dorm so partying and distractions are few. The thing is when I'm working on an assignment, I like to let the subject matter sink in and then I'll meditate on it for a while: days, weeks, months. But I can't do that in college when everything is assigned a due date and I find what I write to be compromised by time and a lack of complete understanding. It's a little frustrating to think that I have the potential to make my papers really top-notch but I don't have the time to do so. It's something I'm trying to get used to. Starting a paper takes forever and when I finally finish one it usually drains me of all creativity so starting the next one takes even longer to start as I scan my brain for more material.

Does anyone have tips or advice to help me out? Thanks!

[Wondergirl]

First and foremost, don't be like I was freshman year and write the entire paper the night before it was due!

A lot will depend on if the paper is creative writing or a research paper The length too will make a difference in how you attack it.

Always choose a subject you can live with for a while (especially for a research paper). Be sure you understand all the requirements, such as style guide to use, page minimum/maximum, library needs for, say, a literature review, etc.

I'm an MS Word freak, so will set up a file in Word and add to it whenever I can. Or, you might like to carry a notebook around and jot down thoughts as they come to you. Actually, you 21st century students have it easy now with the Internet. Back in my day when rocks were cooling, we had no computers, our typewriters were manual, and we had to take a huge stack of notecards to the library and write down EVERYthing we could get our hands on that would help. That was the heyday of the reference librarian, helping students find sources and resources. When typing the paper, if we screwed up something on one page, that entire page and ever ones before it had to be retyped. Arrrgggghhh! The memories! I still break out in a sweat!

Maybe tell us about a recent paper you had to write, and we can take apart how it came to be written.