How to write a College Paper

How to write a college paper--in 21 easy steps!

1. Snatch the assignment sheet from your professor on your way out of class. Stuff it in the bottom of your backpack. Do not, under any circumstances, look at it again until less than a week before the paper is due.

2. Hope that a friend reminds you about the paper the day before it’s due. If so, hurry back to your dorm room to work on it. Discover the assignment sheet seems to have vanished. Text your friend for help.

3. If she doesn’t answer, challenge your roommate to a round of Call of Duty. Play X-box for 3 hours.

4. Assuming your friend still hasn’t texted you back, go to McDonald’s and get a 20-piece chicken nugget to get you in the "zone" to write.

5. On the way back to your dorm, stop at a classmate’s room and see if he has started the paper yet. If he shows you his paper, printed, double-spaced, with ten sources and a full Works Cited page, un-friend him on Facebook. If he hasn’t started either, stop there to watch some YouTube videos.

6. An hour or two later, head back to your room, but make sure you stop at the vending machine and buy a Coke to get you through the night.

7. Sit down at your computer.

8. Open Word. Type your name.

9. Go downstairs. Put in a load of laundry.

10. Check your email. Check your Facebook. IM your friend in Minnesota. Check your favorite message boards. Call your mom.

11. Scrounge under your bed for your style manual (whether it be APA, MLA, or Chicago) and look up the appropriate format for a title page or header.

12. Go down to the vending machine and buy another Coke—you know, to reward yourself.

13. Chances are at this point, the friend you texted earlier will now text you back and tell you she’s at a mutual acquaintance’s 21st birthday bash. You must choose between writing your paper and going to the party—but you really should choose the party, since papers happen all the time, but you only turn 21 once.

14. Go to the party. Have a few drinks. If it’s a really important paper, have a few more. Wake up on the futon in your dorm room a few hours later with no idea how you got there.

15. Change clothes, get ready for bed—suddenly remember the paper.

16. Drink 2 Red Bulls.

17. Sit down at the computer and type like mad. Write down anything remotely related to your topic. Order doesn’t matter.

18. Drink 2 more Red Bulls and 3 Cokes. You will inevitably run out of things to write before you reach your professor’s minimum page requirement, so go online and copy and paste from Wikipedia articles on your topic. Copy random quotes from your textbooks, too; those count as citations, right?

19. Look at the clock. Realize it says 7:00am, and your class is at 8:00am. If you are still one or more pages short, sit down on the floor and cry.

19. Drag yourself back into the computer chair. Guzzle another Red Bull. Slowly and laboriously, grind out another half a page. That’s good enough.

20. Tinker with your network and printer settings until your roommate’s printer will print your paper. Almost there! Stand up to grab the pages off the printer.

21. The caffeine and sugar crash hits, and you collapse on the floor.