College Survival Guide
The fall semester is upon us, and once again the school bell tolls throughout the land. Clang! Clang! No, wait, that’s the trolley. Soon the nation’s ivy-covered halls will fill with arriving students and briefly tolerated parents, and campus life will settle into its time-honored groove, a merry roundelay of binge drinking, confusing sexual experimentation and guilt. Only one inconvenience stands between you, the incoming frosh or outgoing senior, and the blossoming joys of academia: learning.
On that score, the assignment every student fears is the dreaded term paper. A torture device for the underage dating back to medieval times, the term paper remains a useless vestige of outmoded print culture, or so you should argue when you fail to hand one in. Nevertheless, cobwebby academic types tend to insist on these as proof of—well, I’ve forgotten, but they seem to think it matters. And so, alas, it matters to you.
Short Cuts: Don’t waste time reading when you can view the classics.
The good news is, as with any onerous, unfulfilling task—waste removal, home surgery, parenting—there are support resources and helpful guidelines that take the work out of classwork. That leaves only “class,” my friend, with a capital K. By following the simple tips below, you can write a paper on any subject that will satisfy the assignment, please your professor, and (most importantly) elude even the craftiest search engine for plagiarism.
I. Research
Sure, that required-reading list of musty classics looks forbidding. But do you think anyone’s ever actually climbed Mildew Mountain? Fact: the people assigning you these books haven’t read them either. They skidded through college, clawed their way to tenure and survived that ugly business with the TA and the teeth marks by following the advice of an article just like this one. And that advice is: handle the assigned text as you would any hazardous material—with minimal risk of exposure.
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Many students use CliffsNotes—the familiar learning guides that offer synopses, analyses and chapter-by-chapter summaries of classic literary works—in lieu of actually reading the books. This is highly inefficient. The CliffsNotes versions are overlong and burdened with nitpicky detail, and those yellow-and-black covers are a one-way ticket to the optometrist.
Instead, try Biff’s Notes www.slackass.com/functionalilliteracy/biffs, which condense those long-winded literary works to something more digestible—namely, the TV-schedule blurbs for movies and miniseries adapted from the classics. In many cases, they’re improvements upon the dull originals. Which version of The Scarlet Letter would you rather hear about—the one with all that boring Puritan guilt and redemption, or the one where Dimmesdale bangs Demi Moore in the grain shack before the Indian attack?
Let’s be honest. With all that’s been written about Huckleberry Finn, why read Huckleberry Finn? Yeah, yeah, the sagacity of Twain’s prose, the insight into America’s slavery-scarred psyche—thanks, I saw the movie with Jonathan Taylor-Thomas too. No, all you need concern yourself with is what others think of the work in question. Especially your professor. And if your professor has not actually expressed an opinion on Huckleberry Finn, no matter. Surely your instructor has published something in some jerkwater journal you can cite, however unrelated:
What is it that makes a book like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a great book? I am reminded of the learned words of Prof. Drozelton in the essay “Toward a Cognitivist Rethinking of Heteroglossia in Saved by the Bell, Seasons 1-3”: “Cultural-historical connotations delineate their own interwovenness and textual schema.” This guy rocks!
II. Elements of style
The actual writing of a paper is mostly a matter of organization. It may be useful to think of the text as a hamburger, with the introduction and conclusion as buns and the body of the paper as meat. Analysis serves as mustard, with historical and biographical information as additional condiments; some prefer their rhetorical burger plain, with a side of digression and maybe a small salad of mixed metaphors. Don’t look now, but I think you have a sentence fragment between your teeth.
Anyway. First comes preparation. Open a new Word or Windows document. Note the blank expanse. Click inside the text box. Run the text elevator up and down the side. Type the words, “The first thing I want to say is…,” then erase them. Repeat three times. There! You’ve earned a break.
One day, two beers and three rounds of Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories later, it’s time to think about the introduction. Let’s say you’re doing a paper on Shakespeare. There are three surefire introductions that will point your paper down the path to completion. One is the dictionary gambit, which works just as well as it did in 4-H competition back in fourth grade: “Webster’s defines William Shakespeare as ‘English poet and dramatist considered one of the greatest English writers.’ ” Then there’s the straight-shooter approach, beloved of A&E Biography: “In this paper, you will read about the man who was called William Shakespeare.” Grabs you right by the bodkin, eh? Last, there’s the 21st-century opening, in which you lead with a vigorous contemporary source: “Wikipedia calls William Shakespeare the finest screenwriter of the 19th century.”
The thesis statement is a breeze. Just restate the original assignment as if you’d thought of it yourself. With that out of the way, your next several paragraphs should elaborate and prove this central idea, using well-chosen citations and cogent arguments. Failing that, you should pack them with crap the OSS couldn’t decipher. Feel free to apply words like “deconstruct” and “semiotical” the way a bus-station bathroom custodian uses Airwick. Also, any two ideas, however irreconcilable and disconnected, can always be linked with a handy, “But as everyone knows….” It works for Bill O’Reilly.
At last, the conclusion. This is simplicity itself. Type the magic words—“In conclusion”—and a comma, then copy and paste your first paragraph to the end, changing future to past tense. It’s that easy. Some people like to start with, “As I proved above,” just to keep the instructor from getting lippy.
But wait! It’s too short! What do I do? The answer differs depending on the assignment, page count or word count. To extend the page count, up the font size and line spacing until every page looks like a declaration of war in the New York Post.
To stretch that word count, switch from active voice to a grammatical strategy I call “passive aggressive.” Simply change the active “is” to the more stentorian “is thought to have been about to be,” which has the bonus of making your instructor think you translated the entire paper from Latin. If it doesn’t actually make the paper longer, it’ll certainly seem that way. Plus if you have to read it aloud, you’ll feel like a Roman senator in a gladiator movie.
III. Conclusion
In conclusion, the fall semester was thought to have been about to be upon us, but as everybody knows, once again the school bell tolled throughout the land. The nation’s ivy-covered halls filled with arriving students and briefly tolerated parents, and campus life settled into its time-honored groove. As I proved above, only one inconvenience stood between you, the incoming frosh or outgoing senior, and the blossoming joys of academia: learning. Did I mention you can use this stuff later to find a job?