The biggest thing you’ve ever written.
Set word goals and celebrate milestones.
Academic Writing Blog
Tools for coping with anxiety
If you find yourself unable to stop thinking about a past or future event and becoming increasingly emotional, this video can help.
Choosing a topic.
You might feel like you have nothing to work with in choosing your topic, but you likely have many important pieces of information. Begin by considering the subject, the class, the instructor, and yourself.
Tips for a comparative essay (aka a comparison essay.)
One simple mistake that younger writers make when writing a comparison essay is choosing something they like and comparing it to something they dislike. This often seems like a good idea because it is so much fun to think about something you really enjoy and to pick on something that you don’t like. Unfortunately, that usually makes for thoughtlessness and oversimplification.
What if I’m really, really screwed?
The advice here is always to choose sleep and a good meal over perfection. If it all falls apart and you really, REALLY have to stay up all night, here are some tips to get through it without feeling terrible.
The basics of interpreting or analyzing a poem
Poetry is often very daunting even for people who are very comfortable with analyzing narratives. Fortunately, there are a few things you can do to make poetry less intimidating. Some of what makes poetry more intimidating is often its unusual structure (when compared to other types of writing,) its rhyme schemes, and the prevalence of metaphor. For this post, let us examine the structural issues that many find so off-putting.
How do I make my paper longer!
I’ve seen more than a few students say that they have written everything possible on a given subject in only 600 or 2000 words and that it is impossible to add the two more pages that the assignment requires.
I can’t get started! (Part 2)
The trick with making sleep nonnegotiable is to make “go to bed on time” the stress trigger. If you work better while feeling a bit under the gun, start telling yourself at Noon that bed is only eleven hours away. You’ve only got eleven hours, move move move move. All that stuff you say to keep yourself awake and moving at 1AM? You need to start saying it 1PM. You are the one creating pressure for yourself, not the time of day or night; you can pour it on just as easily at 4PM.
I can’t get started! (Part 1)
Procrastination is a friend and an enemy. First of all, calm down, it really is OK to procrastinate. Some people work better under a bit of stress and sometimes those people have to manufacture it themselves. It’s fine! There are two situations you have to look for, though. 1) You procrastinate too much (it leads to lost sleep, lost fun, self-recrimination, and poorer work.) 2) You’ve lost all motivation and are replacing it with plain old stress.
Trials of a returning student.
Everyone around you seems so young. But it hasn’t been that long, has it? You don’t want to be one of those people blabbering on about how old you are or how young they are, but it’s all you can think about. You might not blabber it, because you are three seconds away from screaming it in the middle of the food commons. Time to get a grip! Yes, they are really young. More than that, what is odd is to be in a place where everyone is the same age but it’s not your age. You probably attend things all the time where every single person in the room is about your age and you don’t even notice. It’s all going to be ok.