Don't Blow Off Your Papers

A public service announcement from Ten-Page.

As previously published, I couldn't come through with a memoir on the wonderful Catherine the Great this past week, since I had too much work to accomplish. It would be more correct to say that I had one huge task to accomplish. Every spare moment of the past 4 days has been devoted to preparing my paper for New Deal and World War II, which was, by my own choosing, more ambitious of a task than it needed to be, but that's a story for another day. The point I would like to make is as follows: take your papers seriously. This is not going to be a Gillian-dropped-the-ball-and-waited-until-the-last-minute-to-write-her-paper-so-don't-make-the-same-mistake warning, but I would instead like to comment on my experience writing my paper to illuminate my point.

I wrote this paper on the Atlantic Charter and the ways in which it was a statement of the Allies' war aims and of their vision for the post-war world. If you've never heard of the Atlantic Charter, it's okay, because it really hasn't been studied in the way that I expected. Book after book I opened didn't have much to say about the document. I found a wonderful set of primary sources thanks to the American Presidency Project, but it just perplexed me that not much had been written about what struck me as a pretty important statement of policy and intent. I really enjoyed reading my sources and I found some pretty fascinating insights and had a lot of great ideas for this paper. This is only a last minute story in that I started taking notes last Wednesday, and this paper is due tomorrow, which worried me greatly, but I knew I would manage to get my paper together. Anyway, I get all my notes done on Thursday and I have an outline by dinner time and started writing it after dinner. But in doing that I came to some very interesting realizations and insights that pretty much changed my outlook on the world.

I've always been an idealist; I understand the problems we face, and, believe me, I get the reasons why we have them and why we haven't been able to solve them. But I still see the great potential in humanity and the great capacity to do good. But we don't, and if you want the full theological/historical/observational argument, I'd be glad to fill you in. Suffice it to say that a whole lot of things made a whole lot more sense to me as I analyzed this document and put my paper together.

Which brings me to my point. Papers are healthy. Yes, I love to write, and yes, I worked very hard to earn my nickname. I'm quite proud of my nickname, actually. But a paper is a chance or, dare I say it?, an excuse to really get into something you're interested in and make your brain happy by constructing an intellectual argument. You might get a prompt from a professor, but you still have the chance to make it your own, to add your voice and your insights to the intellectual conversation that academics reference. Not only that, but it gives you the chance to grow as a scholar and as a person. I'm a much better person because I wrote this paper. And it would be awesome if more students realized this about paper writing (and I bet the professors might get excited, too).

One of the best pieces of advice I've gotten recently was from Dr. Jeff Burson, who was a visiting professor last spring when Dr. Black was on sabbatical (WaC people: you can say what you want, but I have a different perspective than you). I met with him one day about graduate school, and he said that it's really beneficial if in graduate school, you treat all your seminar papers as future published articles, because publication is everything in the professional world. I've caught myself treating my undergraduate papers in this way, looking to publish them in the student journals we have here or present them at a conference or two (both of these are true for my WWII paper). It's really helpful advice, and it makes a big difference to look beyond the paper's due date and to think of a paper in this way. So I offer it to all the students out there. Think beyond, think big, and don't blow off your paper.

By the way, I did get my paper done, it just needs the last read-through and one end note needs to be adjusted, after I look up how to properly cite a website. The 16 page draft of the real paper is waiting for me to revise it next week or the week after, after I knock off some of these other assignments.