Your paper is due in 72 hours. You can choose between ten prompts, you don’t like any of them, the difference between the mode of production and the means of production eludes you, and you don’t know where to start.
If you trick yourself into believing you must sit down and write a six-page paper, introduction-body-conclusion, in that order, in more or less one go, you may waste a lot of time staring at a blank screen. Why can’t I figure it out? Maybe if I deep clean my room it will come to me… Instead, you might begin by generating ideas about the paper topic. For your task is not to gift your reader 3,000 words, but to make a well-explained argument. You have to figure out what it is first. A “zero draft,” or a loosely structured analysis, could jumpstart your writing. There’s no time to waste in a nine-week quarter!
Strategy 1: Collect data
I bet you could dash off a five-page description of your happiest childhood memory in half an hour. You are the world’s expert on your own mind. You likely are not the world’s expert on the topic of your SOSC paper, however, so you may need to clarify how concepts, texts, and thinkers introduced in the course relate to one another. If you’re drowning in a sea of natural rights, natural law, and states of nature, it may help to return to the texts.
- Take new notes: Re-read the texts and your class notes with the paper prompt(s) in mind. Take notes on issues relevant to the paper.
- Play with spatial arrangement: Either virtually or on paper, move ideas around as you trace connections between them.
- Write key quotes or concepts on Post-it notes.
- Use an online board like Padlet or Scrumblr to make virtual piles or draw connecting lines.
- Print out some relevant passages or observations and cut them into strips.
- Ask questions: When you’ve finished laying out key concepts, ask yourself:
- What are the relationships between these ideas?
- Where are they alike, where different, and along what axes?
- What interests me about the contrasts I’ve dug up?
- What do I find important?
The answers to these questions may lead you to a thesis statement. Try not to use data-gathering as a procrastination technique, though. At some point the research must stop and the hard thinking must start.
Scrumblr board for a SOSC paper
Strategy 2: Don’t write a paper
You don’t have to write a paper. First just write down what you think. When I find myself staring at blank pages, I tell myself things like:
- You aren’t writing a paper, you’re writing a letter to a friend about Hobbes’ Leviathan.
- You aren’t writing a paper, you’re listing thoughts about Plato’s good city.
- You aren’t writing a paper, you’re writing two paragraphs. Just write two paragraphs about Locke’s state of nature.
Eventually, you will revise the analysis you jot down into essay form. Before you can do that, though, you must map out the bases for your claims—in writing.
Strategy 3: Make a pro tempore thesis statement
Don’t put your writing on hold while you craft the perfect thesis statement. You may not know your argument until you write 2,000 words of analysis. So go ahead and get started writing with a too-general, throwaway thesis statement that you know you’ll refine when you have a better sense of your data.
James F. Stephen, a contemporary of John Stuart Mill, said, “Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself.” You don’t need to become an expert on Hobbes, as it turns out, only on your own arguments. You must have strong claims and good evidence, though, if you hope to persuade a reader. A zero draft can help you discover what you think in complex writing tasks.