<p>i wouldn't say BSing through a paper is bad. if it gets you the grade you want, then go for it. remember you're there to give the professor what s/he wants. you don't have to agree with what you write. you just have to make sure the professor agrees with it.</p>
<p>It's tough to do this sort of thing your first time. One thing you have to remember is that, even when you think you've exhausted all of your ideas and have nothing more to write about, there's always more you could say. BC Eagle gives great advice: look for commentaries and papers on the work, done by professionals - professors, graduate students, literary critics, etc. You should have access to these types of works through your library. I would avoid the lengthening tricks, but you should absolutely meet the minimum page requirement. (Many professors are strict about these things.) Just keep going at it, you probably have the ability to reach 15 pages.</p>
<p>(Once in high school I wrote literally 90 pages for extra credit, though it took over a month.)</p>
<p>one of the many reasons i thank the IB program for!
did my extended essay... 18 pages baby!</p>
<p>Is this a "my papers are longer than your papers" thread?</p>
<p>S2 had to write a 10 page research paper on detainee rights under the Third Geneva Convention (not counting sources or cover page) in 7th grade. By the time he survives IB English and his EE, I suspect he'll be able to drop and give 'em 20 pages without breaking a sweat! ;)</p>
<p>what can you possibly be "researching" to write a 40 page paper for high school English? </p>
<p>i mean, honestly...</p>
<p>throughout college, most of my classes were: midterm, final, paper. Some of them had 3/4 smaller papers instead of a big one. Some of them had 3/4 smaller papers and a big one.</p>
<p>now that you bring that up, i remember hearing in my philosophy class a year or two ago that departments have quotas for the amount of writing they want students to do in class. So if it's a 10 page minimum, some professors will split it up into 3 small papers of 3-4 pgs long or sometimes just give you that one big paper 10pgs long. And not surprisingly that's what I experienced in just about all my liberal arts core classes.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Is this a "my papers are longer than your papers" thread?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Ooh! Ooh! Can I join in?! I once wrote a 394,492,294 page paper on why papers shouldn't be longer than 394,492,293 pages!</p>
<p>...fun times... actually, the longest paper I had to write in college was 47 pages. It was a clinical assessment paper for a senior level psychometrics course. I thought it would be FAR shorter and had been doing finals, writing other papers (about 200 pages worth of smaller final papers that week) and preparing a project to present a study at a national conference (1st author) so I actually wrote the thing in 24 hours (all-nighter) and pulled an A in the course! I looked like a zombie the next day, but oh well, I got the A!</p>
<p>But to be honest, you'll have to write longer stuff than that once you start working in the "real world." I regularly read case reports written by my coworkers for my clients that top 30-50 pages single-spaced and lawyers, for instance, write 50-100 page legal "briefs" on a regular basis. My <em>proposal</em> to my school's IRB (institutional review board) for the above-mentioned study was about 60 pages and had to be absolutely perfect in order to get our study ok'd.</p>
<p>I agree about writing longer documents in the working world. The 10-page papers that a lot of students complain about help to prepare you for some jobs where a lot of writing is common. It may be hard to see it when you're in college but the skills learned here help you through the rest of your academic career and may be quite useful in later jobs.</p>
<p>It's not just the writing that's important. Part of this exercise is learning how to read critically, analyze text and get at the various meanings and possible interpretations. I use those kinds of skills in my job all the time as a 401(k) plan administrator. In addition, I do all the participant-level communications work and website writing -- so you will find these skills useful in the long run. In my field, the folks who get promoted are the ones who can communicate well, not necessarily the number crunchers.</p>
<p>Dont stress or obsess about it. Be METHODICAL about how you approach it: research, read, make notes, make an outline, write it in sections. Its not that hard. In fact, the usual problem is going OVER the amount of pages, not under. Be logical and well reasoned. Make sure you NEVER plagiarize from another student, resource or author. Its a great learning process. Know going in that depending on your writing skills, you will have a lot of red ink commentary from the Professor and take that with a grain of salt and learn from your mistakes. Learning HOW to write is as important as WHAT to write. Writing skills are very valuable in business and in life. DONT PROCRASTINATE. Last minute papers usually become a garbage dump and get the requisite poor grade. Learning to accept criticism is a big lesson in college and its actually meant to HELP YOU, not harm you. </p>
<p>Good luck.</p>
<p>lulz at 12 pages being really long. I'm in high school and I'm taking college classes and 12 pages is a "short paper."</p>
<p>I have three things to say:</p>
<p>1) THANK YOU to everyone who has given me suggestions.</p>
<p>2) SCREW YOU to everyone who has been rude and tried to rag on me for not wanting to write a 15*+* page paper on one of Plato's stories that isn't even 3 pages long....</p>
<p>3) OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS TOPIC IS ON THE MAIN PAGE OF CC! THANK YOU MODERATORS OR WHOEVER PUT IT THERE! THIS HAS BEEN A DREAM OF MINE FOR A VERY LONG TIME! I DIDN'T THINK IT WOULD BE POSSIBLE, BUT IT WAS! I AM ALMOST IN TEARS OF JOY RIGHT NOW! :)</p>
<p>I'll just say that I feel your pain. The longest thing I had to write in hs was about 8 pages total. I didn't take any AP or anything.
I agree with the advice on reading other people's paper to get some inspiration and get thinking.
Since I go to a tech school, our writing intensive class only consist of about 20 pages of writing per semester and we only have to take two of those classes. The other humanities classes have very little writing. I just can't imagine writing 30-40 page papers.... Maybe for my graduate thesis or something, where everything is technical.</p>
<p>Best of luck to you!</p>
<p>We can have long talks with others on things that we are interested in or on things that we know in-depth. Writing about things that we have a lot of interest in requires more work but we can generally say quite a bit. I've found that I can write and write and write on topics that I have a lot of interest in or know very well. The problem arises when you have to write something on a subject that you don't care about or are not interested in. You combine the work of writing with the drudgery of an uninteresting topic.</p>
<p>I attended a speech many years ago that suggested learning to take interests in a variety of things. To look for deeper understanding in unfamiliar areas. To find interesting bits in otherwise uninteresting topics. The idea is to change your mindset about different subjects and ideas. It allows you to maintain a conversation with someone that loves a topic that you know nothing about. It provides you with tools to improve your social abilities. Working on something that you love or are interested in is generally fun and turning schoolwork into fun can make the paper seem easy.</p>
<p>Wow, I always knew that my high school has done a horrible job preparing us for college, but I didn't realize that it was this bad compared to other schools. The longest paper I've had to write was four pages where the limit was two pages. I'm a high school junior right now and in my AP English Language class the longest paper we will have to write is four pages where we will have a month to write it and the English Literature paper all seniors write will be a six page paper that we will have over two months to write.</p>
<p>One piece of advice for you that I haven't seen so far-- read your 3 page plato story. Brainstorm "topics" within it, giving each topic a sheet of paper. As you research/think, write every snipped that you run across on that topic page. Then work one topic at a time, developing it into a coherent point of view. Finally, rank them in the order of importance and how they flow together and use those pages as a "guide" to write your final paper from. Good luck!</p>
<p>Do a lot of research. Read critical theory about your topic - papers/journals/books. If you can't reach 12 pages on one given subject, you don't know enough about it and haven't done enough research.</p>
<p>Ok to whoever asked, we had to write the paper on an american author and read 3 of their works, read criticism from 5+ sources per work, and write on the literary and social history when the author was writing and how the criticism of their work illustrated how their writitng reflected the time period they lived in or paralleled that of another time period which their works were about.</p>
<p>But advice for the OP...skip the intro, just start writing. write whatever comes to you. then go back and rework it as much as you have to. it works a lot better than forcing yourself to stick to a certain method and structure.</p>