<p>"once u start writing, the pages will come, so dont worry bout the length. one trick that someone told me is that you could change the size of only the periods. it makes a big difference but takes a lot of time. pointless in my opinion, but just throwing it out there."</p>
<p>...are you kidding me?</p>
<p>Ctrl+F, ".", highlight all, change font.</p>
<p>Takes all of 10 seconds and adds a good 2 to 4 lines every 2 pages, depending on your paragraphs.</p>
<p>job interview: describe your writing experience</p>
<p>answer: well, I am not that good at meeting the requirements, but I can use tricks to make my paper seem better than it really is.</p>
<p>HIRED!</p>
<p>Fail analogy</p>
<p>Look for commentaries on Plato in your library to see if you can find useful material there and insights into aspects of his writing that you hadn't considered. Go over your class notes to see if there are hints from the professor on things to consider and write about. Ask your professor for ideas and areas to write about.</p>
<p>i'd have a hard time writing a lot if i don't know much about my subject. you should do a lot of research. i did about 1-2 weeks of research before i could finish a 15 page paper. it turned out to be 18 in the end, b/c i added lots of footnotes and i ended up knowing so much about my topic, that i got excited and said too much. my topic was prostitution though, so go figure.</p>
<p>Doing a good job on a paper usually comes with having too much material resulting in the problem of deciding what to trim.</p>
<p>
[quote]
my topic was prostitution though, so go figure.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>should have applied for a grant to do field research...</p>
<p>^ huh... i never thought of it. i just thought it was a fun topic. is it too late to?</p>
<p>a page requirement seems to be a random system - at universities here in nz, assignments have a mandatory word limit, not a page limit. generally, a plus/minus 10% margin is allowed for the word limit. my longest one so far has been a "4000 to 4500" word limit.</p>
<p>in terms of cover page, references etc - i presume they're not included in the page count?</p>
<p>also, what is the policy on paragraph spacing/font? does everyone have to have the same font and spacing (because it seems a bit unfair if this is not the case.) Here, whilst it does vary between the different university schools, I've generally been told to give a paragraph spacing of 1.5 (which, if you have to do a page limit certainly helps, but doesn't boost the word count at all!)</p>
<p>12-15 is a relatively normal paper. Right now, I have to write three 20+ page papers. It gets enjoyable.</p>
<p>I have to disagree. I go to a fairly selective LAC and am an English major and a 12-15 page paper is certainly a longer one. While it's manageable, I understand being nervous before attempting a paper of that length. Generally my 12-15 pagers have been final papers in 100 level classes (final papers in 200+ levels generally tend to be 15-20) but if it's assigned this early, I'm not sure that's what it is. Even as an English major, I haven't taken courses that required more than 2 12-15 pages. 8-10, I think, is more of an average.</p>
<p>Write 4-5 pages, take it to your instructor, ask for guidance.</p>
<p>15 pages in cake, on my freshman year I needed to write a 36 page paper on The clouds, not double spaced 12 pt new times roman.</p>
<p>"Plato's crap"??? Sounds as if your problem is that you aren't interested in philosophy.</p>
<p>Re read the piece you are supposed to write about--or if you are able to select a dialogue for yourself, select the one that interests you the most and reread it. Then, if you still haven't discovered something about it that you'd like to write about, take BCEagle's advice. Read some commentaries. Get an idea what the general issues are regarding the dialogue in question. Go back to the text. See where you disagree with a commentary, or where you can expand upon or insert yourself between some points raised by a couple of them by making some fine distinctions. (The interstice method of lit crit is very safe, if uninspiring. This tends to be more a grad school paper technique, but you can use it anyway if you have to.) Start writing. Make sure you quote from the commentaries you read and cite accurately. Pretending to have come up with these ideas all on your own would be <em>very</em> unwise, because you can rest assured that your professor will be familiar with the literature.</p>
<p>I was nervous and confused too when I was first assigned a real long paper my freshman year. By the time you reach junior year, writing 10-15 page papers will become routine (assuming you're in a writing-intensive major).</p>
<p>wow...not to sound rude but 15 pages is long? I'm a HS senior and junior year ap english we had a 25-page minimum research paper, mine was over 40 pages...</p>
<p>Welcome to college! You'd better get used to this. First semester my first year I had a 15 page and 20 page paper due the same day, as well as an oral exam in Japanese. In hindsight, that was nothing - at the end of my senior year I wrote about 100 pages in the last 2 weeks, 10 of which were in Japanese.</p>
<p>You need to learn how to do it properly - messing with the margins and font sizes might work now, but down the line you'll need to be able to do the research and planning quickly and effectively and write to the requirements with no cheating. Take this as an opportunity to learn how to write any long paper, and talk to your professor if you have questions or problems. If they're a half-decent professor, they should be understanding when you explain this to them. Even if you don't get a stellar grade on this paper, you can go back to your professor and have them explain what could be done better - learn from this now rather than in 3.5 years, it makes things much easier down the line.</p>
<p>Also, that's not really that long.</p>
<p>Reread Plato and as you read, jot down any questions that come to mind no matter how silly they sound. Note any passages that you don't understand. You should easily come up with 20 or 30 questions. Then try to answer them, initially, without doing any research, in your own words. Hopefully this exercise will shake loose your writing hand and will generate lots of pages of notes and ideas. Now, read commentary to get additional insight and start to develop the theme of your paper. After the initial draft, go back and really develop the details of each paragraph. You will get to 15 pages in no time.</p>
<p>there's a lot of good advice here. also it depends on your major and school as to how much you'll be accustomed to writing. just this semester i had a 13 page paper i handed in. but in my major that is far from the norm since it is not writing intensive.</p>
<p>one trick that helps me mentally is to start off writing single spaced. once i reach the half way mark of what i need to get done, i double space the text. it's more of a mental thing. makes me feel as if i have to do 'half' the work only. maybe you want to try that. just write 5-7 pages single spaced then double space it.</p>
<p>I agree with Lala7819, DO NOT try to make a short paper long by using trick like increasing spaces and font size. That is very unprofessional. Professors have higher expectation because it is college, and that is why they make the college application pool so competitive. Having that said, don't try to bs your way through it either.</p>
<p>The longest paper/report we wrote was 100 pages (We had 7 weeks for that). Most of the paper are around 12 to 13 pages.</p>