Laboring over Einstein in a Deadline World

I never had much of attention span, but I was great at focusing over a span of several hours when I really had to. This served me well in college in cramming for tests. Despite all the advice to the contrary, I’d rather cram than actually keep up with the course as we were going along. That was especially true with term papers.

When there is no time to dig for facts, go with the facts strewn around you.

The academically correct approach was to spend blocks of time in the library researching the topic, and then an hour here or there for the essay outline and, finally, doing the writing over well-mananged study periods at least a week before it was due. Then, of course, you would hand it in well before the appointed deadline.

Here’s how I did it. You start with the appointed deadline, which, let’s say, was three weeks away on a Wednesday morning. You would totally ignore the first two weeks, and sometime during the span of the third week you devote random spasms of thought to what your topic might be just so you could hit the ground running Tuesday night, the evening before the paper is due. That’s within the acceptable range of 12 sleepless hours before the designated hour.

You don’t have a whole lot of time for research. Maybe you do your research between 8 and 9 p.m.—usually with hastily gathered sources, possibly even a borrowed library book or text books from previous semesters. You haven’t got time to read your sources line-by-line, so you must master the scanning technique of pulling out relevant factoids and quotes. If they aren’t directly relevant, you  find a way to jam that square peg into a round hole. This is a crucial step in the term paper bullshitting process.

For instance, since I am writing this on Labor Day, let’s say you have all kinds of information at your disposal, thanks to newspaper trivia and news magazine articles, about the holiday and the American labor force. However, the topic of your 2,000-word assignment is about Albert Einstein. Scurrying for a quote, you find out he said “my inner and outer lives depend on the labors of other men, living and dead…” Now that you have introduced labor into the essay theme, you can throw in some of that unrelated Labor Day trivia, tying it to Einstein. You know, Einstein was still an adolescent coming of age in his native Germany when, here in America, President Grover Cleveland proclaimed Labor Day as a federal holiday in 1894. You are another paragraph closer to those 2,000 words. Then write about his legendary work ethic and add something else about Labor Day.

If you are really into the research phase, you break your concentration  to discover it is already 9:30. The conscientious students are already showering for bed so they’ll be well rested for the next day to alertly field queries about their essays. A lesser scholar would start to panic. Not you. You’re thinking it’s time to brew that first pot of coffee.

Forget about your outline, unless an accompanying one is required with the essay. In that case,  you write a hurried outline based on the essay. Not the other way around.  So you hunker down for several hours of writing as the clock ticks into the wee morning hours. In my collegiate days, you needed to type up what you scrawled, which could literally bring you within minutes of leaving for class. If you were really good, and armed with a gallon of Wite-Out, you could type it as it flowed (make that seeped)  from your brain.

Of course, this was years before the advent of Wikipedia and all the other online sources that students enjoy today. It was also before personal computers and printers became staples for students. Had I has such tools when I roamed the hallowed halls of higher learning (usually looking for rooms of classes I had yet to attend), I could have waited until 10 p.m. the night before and still had time for a quick breakfast before departing for class.

As an English major considering graduate school in creative writing, a wife, baby daughter and whiff of reality deterred me from the option of further matriculation. The GI Bill had helped me get through college, with the help of part-time jobs, but now I needed a full-time work.

I didn’t have to look far to see a career for which I was eminently qualified— newspaper journalism. All you needed to be was a half-assed writer who could churn out copy on a deadline—usually the same day. Perfect.

I did learn to honor my craft and to pay appropriate homage to accurate research. But the stories I crafted usually revolved around interviewing sources and applying appropriate paraphrasing and quotes. Talk about having all your sources at hand. Of course, in the last decade-plus of my career, I had the glories of the internet—carefully choosing the sources, of course— to provide extra punch to my deadline writing.

As a benefit, I witnessed the frustration of those who came out of college accustomed to spreading their assignments over a well-constructed week or two or three. They couldn’t take the pressure. We usually converted them to proofreaders and copy editors and tolerated their whining about our typos.

To this day, I distrust people who boasted almost-perfect GPAs in college. Obviously, they were very bright, or had people like me do their term papers, but they had never learned to function in the real world without outlines.