/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.9389972]

Academics of /lit/, whats your process for essay writing? I struggle to start writing because I never feel like I've read enough. So I spend all my time reading and taking short notes and leave it way too late to actually start writing.
I think this is the one problem thats holding me back, I'm always engaged with the content but my essay writing holds me down.

[Anonymous No.9389975]

I'm actually going through the same thing

[Anonymous No.9389999]

I do the exact same thing. I don't think it's necessarily bad, either. I do it because I want the "real" answer to the question I'm trying to ask, or at least I want to ask the right question, and if I'm aware I'd be better able to do that by reading more shit, I obviously want to read more shit.

I've gotten to grad school with that method, with every single essay I've ever written being a fucking nightmare as a result, and it's just now starting to fuck me royally. I tend to have gigantic ambitions for how much I'm going to read, which obviously aren't realistic. I hit a time constraint, end up frustratedly and half-heartedly doing some fraction of my original, ideal research plan, and push this into what responsibly should have been my writing phase, to eke out as much as possible. Of course, never drafting anything, because it's always a work in progress with the idea itself being constantly reformulated with every new thing I read. Then I end up with five days to write a 30 page paper.

Like I said, I've been doing it forever, and I always manage to at least get a good grade out of sympathy when the professors understand what I was going for. But it's horrifically painful every time, nervous exhaustion levels of panic and misery, and it's almost ruined my life twice now by producing total garbage work for make-or-break papers that could have gotten me thrown out.

The only advice I can give is to circumscribe your ambitious projects by biting off manageable chunks of them. That way you don't feel like you're selling out - you're still doing a real, meaningful "section" of the "real" project that interests you - but you don't have to read the entire Western tradition on aesthetics to do it.

[Anonymous No.9391086]

>>9389999
I get the good grade out of sympathy all too often, "really great ideas, but you need to work on your presentation and edit more thoroughly"
Ah well back to work for me ;_;

[Anonymous No.9391213]

>>9389972
one of two approaches, depending on the length of the essay. shorter essays usually favor the first approach, while longer essays tend to require the latter

1. think about some problem in my field and/or the critical literature that interests me at the moment, write and introductory paragraph that paints the problem in the broadest strokes possible, then use the text at hand as a case study in that problem

2. for longer projects I tend to start by re-reading the material in question, scanning the relevant literature and looking for dominant trends in criticism, then re-reading the material again closely, picking solid passages that i'd like to pry apart. then i just start going through, paragraph by paragraph or stanza by stanza, and close reading, with goal of both establishing some semblance of coherence as the work moves forward, and getting the work to exihibit some problem im interested in. depending on how that goes, that work usually becomes the center piece of the essay, then i build around it.

[Anonymous No.9391224]

>>9391213

by "going through" in the second im referring to writing. i usually do line or two of intro text, block quote, explication, etc.

one thing ive learned in tutoring students in writing at a university writing center is that finding a form is far more important than having "ideas." it could be because im a hardcore, unapologetic structuralist, but i really believe that even if you don't completely understand the material, if you have a firm grasp on expository or analytical written forms, you can wrangle it into shape—going back to correct things and refine your formulations in editing, of course, is necessary, but a good grasp of form can propel your thought much faster than trying to digest after overreading.

[Anonymous No.9391364]

Why do I feel like I'm understanding everything until it comes time to write the essay.
Why must I fail at everything.

[Anonymous No.9391399]

>>9389972
The first step to translating your thoughts to paper is organizing them. Write an outline first.

t. wrote almost 70,000 words based on nothing but a fantasy world I made up in my own head.

[Anonymous No.9391559]

>>9389972
Post one of your better essays. we can't help if we don't know what we're working with.
into a pastebin or something

[Anonymous No.9391567]

>>9389972

I start writing almost immediately, then continually revise as I read more.